"When We No Longer Understand the World" Author: [Chile] Benjamin Rabatut Translator: Shi Jie Publisher: People's Literature Publishing House Douban 2022 Foreign Literature (Fiction)

◆Editor's recommendation:

★Shortlisted works for the 2021 International Booker Prize and the U.S. National Book Award!

★Selected as one of the top ten books of 2021 by The New York Times Book Review!

★Selected into Obama’s 2021 summer reading list!

★Recommended works by The New Yorker, The Wall Street Journal, Publishers Weekly, The Guardian, etc.!

★Where is the line between science and morality, genius and madness?

★ Break the boundary between reality and fiction, creating a psychedelic and chilling narrative style.

◆I am in agony and helpless, watching my sense of time, my determination, my sense of responsibility and propriety all being destroyed! Who else but you can thank for this wonderful hell? Please tell me, when did all this madness begin? When did we stop understanding the world?

——"When We No Longer Understand the World"

◆Content Introduction:

The representative work of contemporary Chilean writer Benjamin Labatute includes five short stories based on real people. The novel text blurs the boundaries between history, memoirs, essays and novels, creating a unique narrative style. The book mainly tells how a large number of scientific masters, such as Fritz Haber, the inventor of "gas warfare", Karl Schwarzschild, the proposer of "black hole theory", Erwin Schrödinger who suffered from tuberculosis, and genius physicist Werner Heisenberg, made fire for mankind like Prometheus.

◆Media recommendation:

Rabatut casts the light of the Gothic novel on twentieth-century science, telling in five free-floating vignettes the kinship of knowledge and destruction, brilliance and madness…

——The New York Times Book Review

The book has a familial relationship to the work of Winfried Sebald or Olga Tolkachyuk: a series of narratives that distort biography but also venture into the realm of imagination. The stories in this book are nested within each other, and their points of connection with reality are almost impossible to pin down.

—The New Yorker

Dark and dazzling! Rabatut shows the inextricable links between horror and beauty, between saving lives and destroying them. The book—while erudite and haunting—stubbornly insists on linking the miracles of scientific progress to the atrocities of history.

—The Wall Street Journal

Rabatut offers a polished, unorthodox, and thoroughly fascinating account of the individual personalities and wildly inventive minds that led to some of the greatest scientific discoveries of the twentieth century. The theme of the work is the whole drive of human exploration and the dangers that lie within it.

——Publishers Weekly

Labatouille has written a dystopian nonfiction novel set not in the future but in the present.

——The Guardian

About the Author