The Quantum Chaos of Literature | Dan Rockmore
The Faustian bargain is a spiritual form of a conservation law: nothing good happens without something bad happening too. In the modern version, as depicted in books and movies, the message is that geniuses see far beyond their contemporaries, but often at the expense of lasting relationships and happy families. In our preoccupation with the image of the mad scientist, one can’t help but sense a bit of anti-intellectual schadenfreude lurking in the background—solace for all of us “normals.” Stories of genius don’t have to take this form, but they often do. It’s an organizing principle for the Chilean writer Benjamín Labatut in his widely praised collection of loosely linked stories, When We Cease to Understand the World—the first of his books to be translated into English—and also in his latest, The MANIAC, which he wrote in English. Both are unsettling, often violent books based on some of the twentieth century’s great ideas of chemistry, physics, and mathematics, told as stories of individual obsession and militaristic madness. When We Cease to Understand the World takes …
