A challenge of creative non-fiction
When we cease to understand the world, by Benjamin Labatut, trans Adrian Nathan West. Pushkin Press, 2020.
I picked this book from the fiction shelves in my local library, and when I began to read it I genuinely thought it had been wrongly classified. It offers an account of the experiences and thinking of a number of 20th century physicists and mathematicians such as Heisenberg and Schrödinger. It’s a remarkable read — quite scary at times, given the context of mass destruction. Also, it’s very detailed, so that before long, you ask yourself, how does the author know all this? Well, he’s done a lot of research and eventually cites some of the sources; but he also made much of it up. These are fictionalised accounts, but he’s not upfront about that.
Here’s what the author says in the acknowledgements, provided at the end of the book: “This is a work of fiction based on real events. The quantity of fiction grows throughout the book; whereas ‘Prussian blue’ [the first chapter] contains only one fictional paragraph, I have taken greater liberties in the subsequent texts…”
That’s all you get, and it begs the question: why? The risk is obvious: the reader’s trust in what is before them is quickly eroded, admitting the danger that it comes across as an exercise in cleverness. If this is an arrangement of facts, why not present it as such? After all, this is how mythologies and rumours are generated. At first I thought I was learning a great deal from this book, but I lost confidence, since it doesn’t allow me to be in a position to distinguish established knowledge from imaginative interpretation. This, I note, is a problem consistent with creative non-fiction (CNF).
