Editor’s Note: This is one of the three winning book reviews of LALT’s first-ever book review contest, held in 2023. We are happy to share the winning reviews in this issue of the magazine.
A world that can be explained is not narratable.
Byung-Chul Han, The Crisis of Narration
Barcelona: Anagrama. 2023. 400 pages.
Two happenings from 2023 stand out for their relevance: mid-year, the film phenomenon Oppenheimer, by British-American director Christopher Nolan, gave rise to new and varied reflections on the atomic bomb; then, on the eve of 2024, we got the news that major journal Nature had declared ChatGPT the year’s greatest scientific breakthrough. This is a milestone, inasmuch as it grants preeminence to a nonhuman agent. Any reader would do well to think of these events as far from foreign to Latin American writers—despite their often being type-cast into stories about drug trafficking or Stalin’s lap dogs in various and sundry banana republics—but would do even better to read Maniac (2023), the latest novel by Chilean writer Benjamín Labatut, in which the atomic bomb and artificial intelligence are scoped through an entirely new lens.
Born in the Netherlands in 1980 but residing in Chile since his teenage years, Benjamín Labatut took his first steps as an author with the publication of his short story collection La Antártica empieza aquí (2010), which is dominated by strange tales with a marked predilection for diseases and madness. In 2016 came his next book: Después de la luz, a work that eludes classification within any genre and that shows a propensity to dwell on limits and borderlines, which has since become a defining characteristic of his literature. With his novel Un verdor terrible, published in 2020 and translated by Adrian Nathan West as When We Cease to Understand the World, Labatut raked in unsuspected praise and copious recognition on a global scale. Next came his brief essay La piedra de la locura (2021), in which—guided by H.P. Lovecraft, David Hilbert, and Philip K. Dick—the author ponders the loss of meaning in the present-day world and its effects on politics and other varied ambits of everyday existence.
Maniac, Labatut’s fifth and newest book, sets out to trace the voyage undertaken by science and technology throughout the convulsive twentieth century, taking as its central character the genius Hungarian mathematician John von Neumann. The story draws on the suicide of Austrian scientist Paul Ehrenfest, after murdering his own son, to plunge through a chorus of voices into the patches of light and shadow of science and technology embodied by Von Neumann, one of history’s great minds, whose contributions laid the groundwork for quantum mechanics, the design of the atomic bomb, game theory, and the prototype of the modern computer.
Maniac is the realization of a total novel: one that not only turns its gaze toward the scientific revolution and political agitation of the twentieth century while scrutinizing the present, but also delves into the future.
Benjamín Labatut’s DNA belongs to a particularly exclusive literary lineage, including the Jorge Volpi of In Search of Klingsor (tr. Kristina Cordero, 1999), the Edmundo Paz Soldán of Turing’s Delirium (tr. Lisa Carter, 2003), and the Diego Vecchio of La extinción de las especies (2017): a remarkable and unusual set of authors from the length and breadth of Latin America whose fiction absorbs and molds everything scientific and technological praxis has to offer, whether to transfigure it into a detective story, a political thriller, or a succinct account of the evolution of species and the planet, along with a wide range of other possibilities.
There can be no doubt that another fuel source for Labatut’s writing is his countryman Roberto Bolaño. The reader’s eye will catch this influence in Maniac’s lack of local color and its nods to the genre of biography, above all in telling the life story of a luciferian angel, all of which takes us back to Labatut’s earlier publications. One example is La Antártica empieza aquí, his first outing, which enters into dialogue with the universalism and biographical mode of La literatura nazi en América (1996), and even converses with Bolaño’s posthumous novel 2666 (2004), whose lost writer, Archimboldi, echoes in the figure of marginalized poet Karol Vasek.
In his illuminating essay The Hidden Habits of Genius (2022), Craig Wright reminds us that two consubstantial dimensions of genius are the touch of madness and an energy that tends to degenerate into collateral damage. Here, we might say the Chilean author puts his stamp on a creation that could be called “the poetics of the accursed scientists,” in orbit around scientists who have fallen from the heavens or, in the worst cases, been annihilated by tragedy: gods and heroes, but also humans, all too human. In short, reading Maniac—and this goes for When We Cease to Understand the World and La piedra de la locura as well—guarantees us an encounter with the dark, hidden face behind the progress of the human species.
As I’ve said, Labatut’s work resists the conceptual process of classification that governs our system of genres. Maniac’s narrative sequences operate as fiction as much as biographical reference, and the author sometimes activates a discursive, argumentative order more proper to the essay. His language, in turn, can be emotionally weighty or find its respective denotation within the semantic field of the very science it evokes. The following quote, on perceptions of the atomic bomb detonated at the Trinity test, plainly exemplifies the appropriation of science by the literary register, that perpetual bearer of emotions and intertextualities: “It was sinister, but at the same time, kind of cute… a little Frankenstein monster all patched up, almost frail… My God, the things one can think! But I’m being honest…”
It is worth remembering the concern for the widening abyss between literature and science that tormented first Aldous Huxley, in Literature and Science (1963), and then then George Steiner, in Extraterritorial: Papers on Literature and the Language Revolution (1971). Both writers thought it inevitable that literature should cease to turn its back on science and writers should learn to articulate a language that might communicate scientific knowledge to the literary reader. As a writer, Benjamín Labatut leaps over this obstacle; his work not only puts scientific doings into narrative form, but also sheds light on the points of contact between science and literature. After all, geniuses of Von Neumann and Shakespeare’s stature always challenge the thought of their time to the point of the fiercest, most absolute incomprehension, and must therefore lie in wait for another age to assimilate and normalize their ideas. Geniuses on both sides are rebels who force their contemporaries to see and think of the world quite differently. There can be no context more fitting for what Jonathan Swift once foresaw: the brotherhood of fools who lash out at the genius.
I will conclude by noting that Maniac is the realization of a total novel: one that not only turns its gaze toward the scientific revolution and political agitation of the twentieth century while scrutinizing the present, but also delves into the future. This is why it focuses its lens on the thorny, unfathomable labyrinths of science—the place where, at this very moment, the world to come takes shape.
Translated by Arthur Malcolm Dixon
