When We Cease to Understand the World - Book Group June 2021 discussion thread

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Hanneke Jun 2021 10:47pm, 14 Jun 2021 75,222 posts	0 Hanneke You mean Tomasi di Lampedusa's Leopard? An all time favourite!
Hanneke Jun 2021 10:49pm, 14 Jun 2021 75,223 posts	0 Hanneke Must get back to the book tomorrow. Currently bogged down with a parched garden, spending 3 hours a day watering, tax admin and corporation tax stuff... Grrrrr! I do however have Schrõdinger's cat on my lap...
Chrisull Jun 2021 9:07am, 15 Jun 2021 17,820 posts	0 Chrisull Didn't fare well with the group here!
McGoohan Jun 2021 9:17am, 15 Jun 2021 49,639 posts	0 McGoohan I'm going to look up what I thought of it. Not massively keen IIRC
Diogenes Jun 2021 9:42am, 15 Jun 2021 60,575 posts	0 Diogenes My library service doesn't have this but I will keep it on the list of books to look for.
Hanneke Jun 2021 10:36am, 15 Jun 2021 75,230 posts	0 Hanneke Really Chris? Well, I also loved on the black hill and was almost on my own in that
Chrisull Jun 2021 11:10am, 15 Jun 2021 17,825 posts	0 Chrisull When finishing any book on a Kindle, you are kicked out into the reviews/goodreads section, presumably in an attempt to seal a feedback loop, you liked it, read others like it, persuade others like you to read it and then browse their recommendations for your next read. And while some of the one star reviews are easy to ridicule, a more critical three star one on Goodreads struck me, as it was more a review of the title of the book "When we cease to understand the world" rather than the book itself. The original title "Un verdor terrible", where the interview here: thebookerprizes.com suggests the most accurate translation is "A terrible greenness", which is the thread woven throughout the book. The reviewer in question suggested that the English title is somewhat incorrect, because despite its impressive aural rhythms, the book is almost about the converse, when we understand too much about the world. There are five sections to this book, and the first section Prussian Blue, perhaps the most "enjoyable", if that's the word, takes an Adam Curtis like bbc.co.uk tour through how the discovery of a new blue pigment, led to the creation of the deadliest component in the gas chambers. If you're familiar with the blurb (as I was), you were no doubt expecting fiction to intrude at some point, in fact it only does so in the last paragraph. In fact it seems that the facts are so monstrous, to attempt to fictionalise them would diminish the telling of the stories, the wonderful connections and links that should stay otherwise unadorned. From then on , the ratio of fiction/fact seems to to increase with each section. The second section is equally as dazzling and breathtaking, on how the maths required for Einstein's general theory of relativity was provided on the back of a postcard by a friend/scientist serving on the Russian Front in World War One. Again Schwarzchild's story is so fabulous (in the best mythical sense of the world), that it is in need of no embellishment, his equations even now used in the discoveries of black holes, and may yet form a basis for time travel. Schwarzchild comes to a horrible end before Einstein's reply can even reach him, where his skills are wasted calculating the correct trajectories for shells containing mustard gas/chlorine to be deposited on the French troops, and once again the theme is reiterated, over science over greening itself. The language harks back to "verdure" - Arthur Eddington's testimony to the man "ranging unrestricted over the pastures of knowledge". It's in the third section where the ficts or factional nature of the book becomes more intrusive. Beginning with the shy Japanese mastermind Mochizuki, it soon becomes clear that Mochizuki is a cul-de-sac, or proxy to introduce another extraordinary mathematician, Alexander Grothendieck. Here too many threads are left dangling, what is a+b=c, what is intra-universal Teichmuller theory, how exactly does Grothendieck propose to unify all branches of mathematics? Grothendieck is another insanely, scarcely believable character who would be all too preposterous in fiction. His discoveries and mercurial brilliance pass us by in the narrative like the wind from an express train, and we're left grasping at the leaves in its wake. Grothendieck's "Great turning point" perhaps begging for a little expansion, surprisingly isn't granted a fictional interlude, where he becomes an ultra extreme ecologist giving away all adornments of modern life, making sandals from recycled tyres, feeling only at home amongst the poor and marginalised. His rediscovery by fellow mathematician Leila Schneps serves merely as an ironic punchline to the chapter rather than something that offers further illumination on the man himself, and indeed Mochizuki only returns as a fictional aside to burn the knowledge contained in Grothendieck's final scribbles because the knowledge contained is just too terrible to behold. The fourth section maps the same territory as Carlo Rovelli's Helgoland (that I'm yet to read), a non-fiction account of Heisenburg's time there and his discoveries that underpin quantum physics that so offended Einstein. The accounts of Heisenburg's mist bloated wanderings don't really add to the understanding, and nor does Schroedinger's furtive fantasies involving an fictional adoloscent in the sanitorium. This is where you wish for Rovelli's cool head and classical digressions to help you see the bigger picture. There is a lot of excellent an interesting material, but it's possible even to miss Schroedinger's cat (a satirical thought experiment intended to demonstrate how preposterous the quantum theories were, not as a serious tool for showing how things work) in amongst the unrequited yearnings. Heisenburg's prescient and presumably fictional final dreams of Hiroshima are somewhat unconvincing. And it's left for the fifth section to knock the train back onto its tracks and we're back to modern day Chile, where the author describes an acquaintance , a night gardener who introduced Labutat to some of the fabulous cast, but provides the key linking image, the lemon tree in the final year of its life grows so full and ripe of lemons that boughs can break off, and then after this final flourish it dies surrounded by its final rotting fruits. And here the disconnect between the original title and the translated title seems at its most extreme. It feels a little too glib to see each section as an essay on how the human race is engineering its own extinction from the fruits of its knowledge, and yet the sections don't marry up quite otherwise. So I admired it, was gripped, fascinated and enriched by it, but I never quite loved it. 7 and 1/2 out of 10? (Just to annoy McG).
McGoohan Jun 2021 11:22am, 15 Jun 2021 49,641 posts	0 McGoohan Aaaargh! 7.5. Don't break the system! Aaargh! I agree about the title. I realised about half-way through that it has a completely different title from the original and one that implies something else entirely.
Chrisull Jun 2021 11:56am, 15 Jun 2021 17,827 posts	0 Chrisull Ok 8 then...
McGoohan Jun 2021 12:26pm, 15 Jun 2021 49,644 posts	0 McGoohan I am considering for July's book having a scoring system of 0, 1.25, 2.5, 3.75, 5, 6.25, 7.5, 8.75, 10 Actually, considering the subject of this month's book, I should maybe have gone with e, i, pi, etc.