Benjamin Labatut | |
|---|---|
 Labatut in 2014 | |
| Born | Benjamín Labatut 1980 (age 43–44) Rotterdam, Netherlands |
| Nationality | Chilean |
| Occupation | Writer |
| Notable work | When we cease to understand the world The MANIAC |
| Awards | Santiago Municipal Literature Award (2013) |
Benjamín Labatut (born 1980) is a Chilean writer.
Labatut was born in Rotterdam, Netherlands. He spent his childhood in The Hague, Buenos Aires, and Lima. He moved to Santiago at the age of 14.
Labatut's first book of stories, La Antártica empieza aquí, won the Premio Caza de Letras 2009, awarded by UNAM and Alfaguara in Mexico. It also won the Santiago Municipal Literature Award in the short story category in 2013. His second book, Después de la luz, came out in 2016, followed by Un verdor terrible, which was published in English by Pushkin Press with the title When We Cease to Understand the World and nominated for the 2021 International Booker Prize. [1] [2] His subsequent book, The MANIAC , was published in English in 2023 by Penguin Press, and is a story centered around the Hungarian polymath John von Neumann. [3]
One of his main literary references was the Chilean poet Samir Nazal, whom he met in 2005 and who acted as a mentor during his early days. Nazal aided him during the writing of the first book he published, Antarctica Starts Here, a collection of seven stories. Other influences he has recognized include Pascal Quignard, Eliot Weinberger, William Burroughs, Roberto Bolaño, and W. G. Sebald.[ citation needed ]
His second book, Después de la luz (After the Light), has been described by Matias Celedón in this way: "Benjamín Labatut describes a system of apparent links, made up of a series of scientific, religious and esoteric notes that coexist with the biographical account of a stranger obsessed with refuting nothing by exploring 'the continuous creation of false worlds.' In Después de la luz he narrates the ontological crisis of a subject facing the void in a world saturated with information and devoid of meaning. The consistent reality is refutable proof for the author. Labatut listens to a voice: the mind of a man who does not fit in a single universe." [4]
Labatut's third book, When We Cease to Understand the World, was published in 2020 by Pushkin Press. He said that "it is a book made up by an essay (which is not chemically pure), two stories that try not to be stories, a short novel, and a semi-biographical prose piece."[ citation needed ]
Ricardo Baixera, a literary critic for El Periódico, maintained that it was a "very strange fiction that from the first page questions the parameters of reality, and what we understand by literature."[ citation needed ] John Banville, who described the book in The Guardian as "ingenious, intricate and deeply disturbing", said that the book "could be defined as a non-fiction novel". [2]
Roberto Careaga, a journalist from El Mercurio argued that the author follows "those scientists who captivated him, but it is not a collection of biographies: intense and variegated, it is a volume of stories strung along the brilliant paths of 20th-century science that ended in the unknown and sometimes in pure darkness. They refer to real events, but Labatut ... adds a dose of essay and also fiction".[ citation needed ]
Ruth Franklin, writing in The New Yorker, argued that
There is liberation in the vision of fiction’s capabilities that emerges here—the sheer cunning with which Labatut embellishes and augments reality, as well as the profound pathos he finds in the stories of these men. But there is also something questionable, even nightmarish, about it. If fiction and fact are indistinguishable in any meaningful way, how are we to find language for those things we know to be true? [5]
When We Cease to Understand the World has been translated into 22 languages by publishers from Germany, China, the United States, France, The Netherlands, England, and Italy. The English edition of the book was shortlisted for the International Booker Prize in 2021. It was selected for the New York Times Book Review 's "10 Best Books of 2021" list. [6]
The MANIAC is Labatut's fourth book, a fictionalised biography of the polymath John von Neumann. The book was published in 2023 and received mostly positive reviews. It is centered on the life of von Neumann, though the first part of the book is about physicist Paul Ehrenfest, and the last one is about Lee Sedol's Go match against DeepMind's artificial intelligence program AlphaGo. The name of the book is derived from the MANIAC I, one of the first computers built in von Neumann architecture. [7] [8]
John von Neumann was a Hungarian-American mathematician, physicist, computer scientist, engineer and polymath. He had perhaps the widest coverage of any mathematician of his time, integrating pure and applied sciences and making major contributions to many fields, including mathematics, physics, economics, computing, and statistics. He was a pioneer in building the mathematical framework of quantum physics, in the development of functional analysis, and in game theory, introducing or codifying concepts including cellular automata, the universal constructor and the digital computer. His analysis of the structure of self-replication preceded the discovery of the structure of DNA.
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A polymath is an individual whose knowledge spans a substantial number of subjects, known to draw on complex bodies of knowledge to solve specific problems.
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Klára Dán von Neumann was a Hungarian-American mathematician, self-taught engineer and computer scientist, noted as one of the first computer programmers. She was the first woman to execute modern-style code on a computer. Klára made significant contributions to the world of programming, including work on the Monte Carlo method, ENIAC, and MANIAC I. She was introduced to a lot of her work through her husband, John von Neumann.
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All models are wrong is a common aphorism and anapodoton in statistics; it is often expanded as "All models are wrong, but some are useful". The aphorism acknowledges that statistical models always fall short of the complexities of reality but can still be useful nonetheless. The aphorism originally referred just to statistical models, but it is now sometimes used for scientific models in general.
Ruth Franklin is an American literary critic. She is a former editor at The New Republic and an Adjunct professor at New York University's Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute. Her first biography, Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life, won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Biography and was named a New York Times Notable Book of 2016.
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The MANIAC is a 2023 novel by Chilean author Benjamin Labatut, written in English. It is a fictionalised biography of polymath John von Neumann, whom Labatut calls "the smartest human being of the 20th century". The book focuses on von Neumann, but is also about physicist Paul Ehrenfest, history of artificial intelligence, and Lee Sedol's Go match against AlphaGo. The book received mostly positive reviews from critics.
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