when we no longer understand the world

◆Editor's recommendation:

★2021 International Man Booker Prize, American National Book Award short list works!

★ Selected as one of the top ten best books in the New York Times Book Review Weekly in 2021!

★Selected in Obama's 2021 summer reading list!

★Recommended works by "The New Yorker", "Wall Street Journal", "Publishers Weekly", "The Guardian" and so on!

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

★ Breaking the boundary between reality and fiction, creating a psychedelic and grim narrative style.

◆I was miserable and helpless, watching my sense of time, my firm determination, my sense of responsibility and sense of proportion being destroyed together! To whom can this wonderful hell be attributed but you? Please tell me, when did all this madness start? Since when have we stopped understanding the world?

——"When We No longer Understand the World"

◆Introduction:

This is the representative work of contemporary Chilean writer Benjamin Rabatut, which includes five short stories based on real characters. The texts of the novels blur the boundaries of history, memoirs, essays and novels, creating a unique narrative style. The book mainly tells about the inventor of "poison gas warfare" Fritz Haber, the proposer of "black hole theory" Karl Schwarzschild, Erwin Schrödinger who suffered from tuberculosis, and the genius physicist Werner Heisenberg. Waiting for a large number of scientific masters, how to make fire for human beings like Prometheus.

◆Media recommendation:

Rabatoute casts the light of the Gothic novel on twentieth-century science in five free-floating vignettes that tell the kinship of knowledge and destruction, brilliance and madness...

——The New York Times Book Review

This book has family ties to the works of Winfried Sebald or Olga Tolkacchuk: a series of narratives that distort biography but also venture into the realm of the imagination. The stories in this book are so nested within each other that it's almost impossible to pin down exactly where they connect with reality.

——The New Yorker

Dark and dazzling! Rabatoute demonstrates the inextricable link between horror and beauty, between saving and destroying lives. The book -- haunting as it is erudite -- doggedly insists on connecting the wonders of scientific progress with the atrocities of history.

——The Wall Street Journal

Rabatoute offers a polished, heretical, and thoroughly riveting account of the personalities and wild inventiveness that sparked some of the greatest scientific discoveries of the twentieth century. The theme of the work is the full drive of human exploration and the dangers involved.

-- "Publishers Weekly"

Rabatoute has written a dystopian non-fiction novel set not in the future but in the present.

--"Guardian"