“I know you’re trying to get around it,” says Benjamín Labatut when I put it to him that his books touch people with unworldly intelligence working on problems that are maximally deep, “but the best way to sum it up is: ‘Why is I’m interested in mad scientists?’” Fair play. There’s no getting around it: that’s exactly what his richly satisfying, deeply researched books are all about.
Both of Labatut’s two books currently available in English – the International Booker shortlist When we stop understanding the world (2020) and The Maniac, recently published in paperback – revolves around that moment in the early 20th century when our dreams of a perfectly rational understanding of the world were turned on their heads. That was when the disturbing discoveries of quantum physics killed the clockwork universe; and when Kurt Gödel’s incompleteness theorem destroyed the positivist project of providing a stable, logically unassailable foundation for the rules of mathematics.
That period coincided with the birth of the atomic age and the species-wide anxiety that accompanied it. The characters Labatut is drawn to are those who pursued these discoveries, at the expense of their peace of mind and often their sanity – figures like Karl Schwarzschild, who did the math that predicted the existence of black holes; or Werner Heisenberg, half out of his mind on Heligoland; or Alexander Grothendieck, a mathematical prodigy of staggering brilliance who ended his days in the Pyrenees raving about the devil.
“It’s like mystics: they have reached their Godhead,” says Labatut. “And you know, God kind of whispers, ‘There’s something… back there.’ That image of the demiurge, I think we’re coming face to face with it: we’re growing up as a species, and that’s why it feels like it’s coming to an end. That is, what – since quantum mechanics and modern relativity – 100 years? A hundred years after Christ was nailed to a cross, you start getting the Gospels. That’s where we are.”
In the main character of The Maniac, John von Neumann, Labatut found what he calls “the spirit of our time”. Von Neumann was involved in the attempt, torpedoed by Gödel, to reconsider the basis of pure mathematics. He was a central figure in the Manhattan Project, he designed the first recognizable computer, laid out the basis of game theory and was one of the fathers of artificial intelligence. Von Neumann was also a restless, selfish, sometimes seemingly amoral character, possessed of what Labatut calls a “cold, calculating, sharp and cutting intelligence”.
Religious feeling permeates Labatut’s portraits of some of the most rational men who ever lived. Dream of a secular paradise, says Labatut, killed our God and replaced him with reason – but “mankind will never get rid of its impulse towards apotheosis; we are driven by this thirst for the absolute that is cooked in our minds”. “Every nymph and every god we killed brought us more power… and more despair. It just cast a greater darkness over the world,” he says. “You turn your eyes to the light and you are blinded: by AI, by technology, by going to the stars. And you turn around and you see the kind of Lovecraftian demons that well up from inside us.”
Already a celebrity in the Spanish-speaking world, Labatut is starting to attract attention in the Anglosphere thanks to the International Booker and Barack Obama’s endorsement. When we speak, he is fresh from an on-stage interview with Stephen Fry at the Hay Festival. Labatut’s first two books were in Spanish, and he collaborated closely on the English translation of When We Cease to Understand the World, but he wrote The Maniac in English, which he says “I consider my first language”, even if it is not.
Asked about his early life with continental jumping, he says: “I wish it was something worth telling. But there’s no story there at all. My father got a job. I’m in the Netherlands was born, lived there until I was two, went back to Chile until I was eight, and then lived there until I was about 15, 16. In other words, my family moved around a lot more and sometimes I was with they went
“I grew up halfway between Chile and the Netherlands and spoke English – which is strange. So I’m not really Chilean; definitely not Dutch. How do you explain to someone that you grew up with Bottom and The Young on VHS and read Red Dwarf novels? People are like, ‘Oh, so you’re interested in science?’ I’m like, ‘Yeah, I read Douglas Adams when I was a kid, and since then I can’t think in any other terms’.
How far is Labatut able to follow his subjects into the weeds of number theory or the Schrödinger equation? Does he really understand the ideas in his idea novels? “I can’t teach my 12-year-old daughter simple math,” he says. “I don’t know anything about math. But I think a writer’s mind works with sympathy, not with understanding.”
“What fascinates me the most are things that remain mysterious, things that are unsolved. In my books I like to invite people to go down again, to go back into the darkness to enjoy this rare pleasure of being in the presence of something which, as Grothendieck said, is enormous and very subtle; it’s quiet but you know anger.”
“I’m not a serious thinker,” he continues. “I’m a writer: it’s very different. I think a writer’s intelligence must be alive, must be incomplete. It must bear contradiction. It has to be kind of random and amateurish.”
Labatut, meanwhile, is flamboyantly dismissive of most of the things that novels (including his own) do well. When I compliment him on, for example, the way he captures the different idioms of his speakers (The Maniac is a kind of choral portrait of Von Neumann, with his teachers, friends, co-workers and wives narrating in turn), he says: “I not interested.And I don’t think I’m very good at it.Most of what people consider great writing is that talent for voices [and] character. It’s not something that interests me.
“In every chapter of that part I think that there is an idea that I have to overcome. I try to get people turned on by the crisis in the foundations of mathematics. I’m trying to get people to feel the horror and beauty of the first nuclear approach.” The very idea of capturing a voice inspires him to a crescendo of outraged screams: “They’re not important to me! When you’re in London, you go out there, you listen to a bunch of voices around you. Just record them and imitate them! It’s not difficult! I don’t understand why there’s all this crazy, ‘Oh, we caught it.’ What’s hard is for any of those characters to say anything interesting!
“I’m interested in ideas,” he says. “I think so much writing is not about ideas. It has to do with, you know, the volatility of our character. Those things bored me to death. I probably haven’t read a novel in over a decade.” Now in his mid-40s, Labatut lost his own appetite for fiction after a “crisis” he suffered at age 30, which “damaged that part of my brain that can enjoy the games of narrative”.
He explains: “The people I admire most in every field have this amazing ability to let their unconscious bleed into what they do. I really think that the highest form of intelligence is possessed from outside. I knew I didn’t have it, so I did a bunch of really irresponsible things to try and get it started. And when you put yourself through that kind of ordeal, you never know what shape your thoughts will take at the end of the day. It was catastrophic for me in many ways, but it also helped pave a personal path to writing.”
Not to be pushy, but are we talking psychedelics? “No, it’s good. You can be pushy, but I’ll dodge the question. Let’s just say that there are a bunch of modern and ancient ways to try to get past your blind spots to inspire a bigger mindset, and they work. The problem is that you never know how they will work.”
If you called Labatut a practitioner of the “nonfiction novel,” you might risk grouping his work with the recent explosion of autofiction—but that would be a mistake. He is much more like Tom McCarthy than he is Rachel Cusk or Karl Ove Knausgaard. He was once quoted as saying he missed the days when a novelist wrote “I” and you knew they were lying. “Wasn’t it beautiful?” he says. “I think Bolaño said it best, right? If you’re a mass murderer, or, like, a detective in Mexico City, if you run guns blazing with Rambo, then please continue autofiction. If you’re the world’s highest paid sex worker, then autofiction is.”
He stopped, a little cheerful. “It’s not my cup of tea. The world is so much more interesting. This art that just reflects what our general experiences of the world are… Well, there’s EastEnders for that.”
“But, but…” I say. Voice, character, feelings, love, friendship, career – haven’t these been the staples of fiction since its 19th-century heyday? “If the writing is great, it doesn’t matter,” he concedes, before unexpectedly turning his disdain for tradition into a gesture of humility. “Okay. I’m just not that good a writer – so I have to write about interesting things. If I were a great prose writer, if I were a stylist, sure: I’d tell them who I had sex with and what I had for breakfast. But because I’ve never considered myself that good, I have to write about the deepest and most confusing things there are.”
The closing section of The Maniac describes – “almost like sports reporting” – the triumph of AI over a human champion at the game of Go. The rise of AI is Von Neumann’s legacy, and Labatut is not at all convinced by the argument that it’s just “funny autocomplete.” “When you have a mathematical system that can manage language, you have the two most powerful things we’ve evolved as a species working together: math and language,” he says. “I think we are absolutely on the brink of something, if not past the brink. I think that the first AI catastrophe, because of the way things are going, massive corporations racing to the bottom, is probably inevitable.”
He adds: “The best compliment I’ve received so far is when people tell me, ‘Your book gave me a panic attack. I started to feel bad. I couldn’t read it.’ Or: ‘I finished the book, and then I saw an AI headline and I had a panic attack.’ Welcome on! Books should give you a panic attack – or at least point you in that direction.”
