Darwin8u's Reviews > When We Cease to Understand the World

Whenever there is a disaster of epic proportions, something so grand it adjusts the way we look at the world (think Greeks and volcanos, other civilizations with fires, floods, famines) a myth often gets created to explain it. Gods were made. Stories were told. We need to make sense of the world and grand myths give us structure.

The 20th century, with its world wars and the emergence of quantum mechanics and the atomic age, created a huge disruption. The gods that came out of the 20th century were mathematicians and physicists (at least for a while) and we developed myths about them. Certainly, they were real men, with real passions; real flesh and blood, but they were our rock stars, our saviors, a ultimately, perhaps, our destroyers.

The use of fiction mingled with nonfiction isn't new. We have seen it several times with Norman Mailer, Hilary Mantel, Truman Capote, etc. We see it all the time with movies (Based on a true story). But often, when we mix fiction and nonfiction, it causes some heartburn in those who crave certainty. The problem is we live in an age of uncertainty. We have deconstructed the atom and history. Even those histories that seem rigorous and scholarly, can also be perceived as works of fiction. Just like an electron can take an infinite number of paths between two points, so too can a historian when writing about a grand figure of history. Gaps are filled. Assumptions are made. Things are included and excluded. The record is only so available. The reader either fills in what she wants or the author, in sketching a line between points ,makes an assumption about a path.

What Labatut has done here is explicitly been creative in those gaps. He's ventured into an almost mythic and surreal darkness and come out with a story that seems born as much as written. These stories weave a fabric together with fact and fiction and the pattern is dark, but also illuminates.