Recently, I have not regarded the advice of other editors especially the ones written without "manners". The overreaction in me shows I didn't accept them in good faith. But as you see me now, I am all ears, push it and be bold to tell me that. I am an adult and by materialistic input needs to hear other people—so I have started. What a world without "Wikipedia". Regards 👏👏👏
Important interest
WP:ADOPTION – Process through which new users interact with and gain experience from more established users.
WP:ER – Process through which users receive feedback from other users on their editing style and community participation.
WP:XFD – Set of forums for discussion on whether or not specific content on Wikipedia should be retained.
WP:BACKLOG – List of editing tasks that can be done by any user, need to be done, but haven't been done.
WP:RA – List of articles other people think should be written, now write one!
WP:HD – Place to ask and answer questions about how to do something on Wikipedia.
WP:AFC – Assisting users without accounts to create articles.
When We Cease to Understand the World (Spanish: Un Verdor Terrible; lit.'A Terrible Greening'), published in 2021, is a book by the Chilean writer Benjamín Labatut. It selected certain individuals known to have sacrificed in revolutionizing science and other related humanitarian mankind while focusing on the themes of sacrifice, madness, and destruction hidden beneath the discovery of science and its development.[1] The book was a real identified fiction, and was either called a nonfiction, novel, or biographical narration.
Due to its difficulty in classification, many critics called it a novel, others a short story collection of essayistic mode.[2]
Background
Plot summary
The book ended when the "night gardener" was telling the narrator about the death of the citrus trees, which atlas yield monstrous crop. But when those fruits ripen, the trees' whole limbs breaks because of huge weight, and after a few weeks, will be covered up by the ground with rotting lemons. To him, it was very strange.
Genre
Style and Themes
Style
In When We Cease to Understand the World, Labatut wrote with a beginning scenario of apocalypse. It was seen revolving his narration of the "Night Gardener"; wavering between different opinions of world creation and it's destruction.[2] Labatut used a precise style so that it often achieves concision, cruel and humor.[3]
Themes
Critical reception
When We Cease to Understand the World was selected by Barack Obama in 2021 for his annual Summer Reading List.[4] It was a Finalist for the Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction by Los Angeles Times. While Labatut said the book is a "work of fiction based on real events", John Banville of the British magazine The Guardian argued of it better called a nonfiction novel, since the majority of the characters are historical figures, and the narratives were based on historical fact.[5] Franklin Ruth of The New Yorker said it was a meditation in prose that bears a familial relationship to the work of W. G. Sebald or Olga Tokarczuk, while detailing a sequential biography of both.[6]
Corinna da Fonseca-Wollheim in The New York Times Book Review praised the book as "a gripping meditation on knowledge and hubris. [Labatut] casts the flickering light of gothic fiction on 20th-century science",[7] while John Williams in The New York Times Book Review says that When We Cease to Understand the World "fuses fact and fiction to turn the modern history of physics into a gripping narrative of obsessed scientists, world-changing discoveries, and the ultimate results—often quite dark—of our drive to understand the fundamental workings of the universe." While reviewing the book for the The Wall Street Journal, Sam Sacks praised the book as "Darkly dazzling". Furtherly asserting that Labatut illustrates "the unbreakable bond between horror and beauty. The book as haunting as it is, stubbornly insists on connecting the wonders of scientific advancement to the atrocities of history."[8]
In a starred review by Publishers Weekly, the book called Labatut’s stylish English-language debut "offers an embellished, heretical, and thoroughly engrossing account of the personalities and creative madness that gave rise to some of the 20th-century's greatest scientific discoveries."[9] Constance Grady in writing for the American news website Vox wrote, "When We Cease to Understand the World is one of the most beautiful books I’ve read all year, and one of the weirdest, too. Its subject seems to be scientific awe: the cosmic horror of seeing what lies at the center of the universe, and how very far such realities are from our small human ways of perceiving the world."[10]
References
Notes
Citations
^Shaheen 2021, pp. 714–725. sfn error: no target: CITEREFShaheen2021 (help)
^ abMuller 2022, pp. 9–28. sfn error: no target: CITEREFMuller2022 (help)
Shaheen, Aamir (December 31, 2021). "Historiographic Metafictional Portraits of Twentieth Century Scientists in Labatut's When We Cease to Understand the World". Pakistan Social Sciences Review. 5 (IV): 714–725. doi:10.35484/pssr.2021(5-IV)54.