“I know you’re trying to skirt around it,” says Benjamín Labatut when I put to him that his books concern people of unworldly intelligence working on problems that are maximally deep, “but the best way to sum it up is: ‘Why am I interested in mad scientists?’” Fair play. There’s no getting away from it: that’s exactly what his richly satisfying, deeply researched books are about.
Both of Labatut’s two books currently available in English – the International Booker-shortlisted When We Cease to Understand the World (2020) and The Maniac, recently published in paperback – pivot around that moment in the early 20th century in which our dreams of a perfect rational understanding of the world were turned on their heads. This was when the deranging discoveries of quantum physics killed off the clockwork universe; and when Kurt Gödel’s incompleteness theorem destroyed for good the positivist project to supply a stable, logically unimpeachable foundation for the rules of mathematics.
