‘People say my book gave them a panic attack’: When We Cease to Understand the World author Benjamín Labatut

“I know you’re trying to skirt around it,” says Benjamín Labatut when I put to him that his books concern people of unworldly intelligence working on problems that are maximally deep, “but the best way to sum it up is: ‘Why am I interested in mad scientists?’” Fair play. There’s no getting away from it: that’s exactly what his richly satisfying, deeply researched books are about.

Both of Labatut’s two books currently available in English – the International Booker-shortlisted When We Cease to Understand the World (2020) and The Maniac, recently published in paperback – pivot around that moment in the early 20th century in which our dreams of a perfect rational understanding of the world were turned on their heads. This was when the deranging discoveries of quantum physics killed off the clockwork universe; and when Kurt Gödel’s incompleteness theorem destroyed for good the positivist project to supply a stable, logically unimpeachable foundation for the rules of mathematics.

That period coincided with the birth of the atomic age and the species-wide agonies that accompanied it. The characters to whom Labatut is attracted are those who pursued these discoveries, at the cost of their peace of mind and often their sanity – figures such as Karl Schwarzschild, who did the maths that predicted the existence of black holes; or Werner Heisenberg, going half out of his mind on Helgoland; 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 reached their Godhead,” says Labatut. “And, you know, God kinda whispers: ‘There’s something … back there.’ That image of the demiurge, I think we’re coming face to face with it: we are growing up as a species, and that’s why it feels like it’s coming to an end. It’s been, what – since quantum mechanics and modern relativity – 100 years? One hundred years after Christ was nailed on a cross, you start to get the Gospels. That’s where we are.”

In the principal protagonist of The Maniac, John von Neumann, Labatut has found what he calls “the spirit of our age”. Von Neumann was involved with the attempt, torpedoed by Gödel, to rethink the basis of pure maths. He was a central figure in the Manhattan Project, he designed the first recognisable computer, set out the basis of game theory and was one of the fathers of artificial intelligence. Von Neumann was also a troubled, selfish, sometimes seemingly amoral character, possessed of what Labatut calls a “cold, calculating, sharp and cutting intelligence”.

Religious feeling suffuses Labatut’s portraits of some of the most rational men ever to have lived. Dreaming of a secular paradise, Labatut says, we killed God and replaced him with reason – but “humankind is never gonna rid itself of its impulse towards apotheosis; we’re driven by this thirst for the absolute that’s cooked into our minds”. “Every nymph and every god we slayed brought us more power … and more despair. It just cast a bigger darkness on the world,” he says. “You turn your eyes towards the light and you’re blinded: by AI, by tech, by going to the stars. And you turn around and you see the sort of Lovecraftian demons that are welling up from within 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 though it isn’t.

Asked about his continent-hopping early life, he says: “I wish it was something worth telling. But there’s no story there at all. My dad got a job. I was born in the Netherlands, lived there till I was two, went back to Chile till I was eight, and then moved back to the Netherlands. Stayed there till I was about 15, 16. In other words my family moved around a lot more and sometimes I went with them.

“I grew up halfway between Chile and the Netherlands, speaking English – which is weird. So I’m not really Chilean; definitely not Dutch. How do you explain to someone that you grew up watching Bottom and The Young Ones on VHS and reading 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 from then on I cannot 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 actually understand the ideas in his novels of ideas? “I cannot teach my 12-year-old daughter simple mathematics,” he says. “I know nothing about mathematics. But I think a writer’s mind works with sympathy, not with understanding.”

“What fascinates me most is things that remain mysterious, things that are unsolved. In my books I like to invite people to go down again, to go back into darkness to enjoy this rare pleasure of being in the presence of something that as Grothendieck said is enormous and very subtle; that is quiet but, you know, raging.”

“I’m not a serious thinker,” he continues. “I’m a writer: that’s very different. I think a writer’s intelligence has to be alive, has to be incomplete. It has to carry contradiction. It has to be sort of haphazard and amateur.”

Labatut is flamboyantly dismissive, meanwhile, of most of the things that novels (including his own) do well. When I compliment him on the way he captures his speakers’ different idioms, for instance (The Maniac is a sort of choral portrait of Von Neumann, with his teachers, friends, collaborators and wives taking turns narrating), he says: “I’m not interested. And I don’t think I’m very good at it either. Most of what people consider great writing is that talent for voices [and] character. That’s not something that interests me.

“In every single chapter of that part, I am thinking that there’s an idea I have to get across. I’m trying to get people to be turned on by the crisis in the foundation 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 yelps: “They’re not important to me! If you’re in London, you go out there, you listen to a bunch of voices around you. Just record them and imitate them! That’s not difficult! I don’t understand why there’s all this crazy, ‘Oh, we captured this.’ What is difficult is for any of those characters to say something interesting!

“I’m interested in ideas,” he says. “I think so much of writing doesn’t have to do with ideas. It has to do with, you know, the vicissitudes of our character. Those things bore me to death. I haven’t been able to read a novel in more than a decade, probably.” Now in his mid-40s, Labatut lost his own appetite for fiction after a “crisis” he underwent at the age of 30, which “damaged that part of my brain that can enjoy the games of narrative”.

He explains: “The people I admire the most in every field have this wondrous ability to let their unconscious bleed into what they do. I really think that the highest form of intelligence is possession from outside. I knew that I didn’t have that, so I did a bunch of very irresponsible things trying to kickstart that. And when you put yourself through that sort of ordeal, you never know what shape your mind is going to have 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 intrusive, but are we talking psychedelics? “No, it’s fine. You can be intrusive but I’ll dodge the question. Let’s just say that there’s a bunch of modern and ancient ways to try to get past your blind spots to inspire a larger mindset, and they work. The problem is that you never know how they’re going to work.”

If you called Labatut a practitioner of the “nonfiction novel”, then, you could risk grouping his work with the recent explosion of autofiction – but that would be a mistake. He’s much more like Tom McCarthy than he is like Rachel Cusk or Karl Ove Knausgård. He was once quoted saying he missed the days when a novelist wrote “I” and you knew they were lying. “Wasn’t that lovely?” 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 with Rambo, then please, please go ahead and autofiction. If you are the world’s best-paid sex worker, then autofiction.”

He pauses, a little mirthful. “It’s not my cup of tea. The world is so much more interesting. This art that merely reflects back what our common 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 basic stuff of fiction since its 19th-century heyday? “If the writing is great, it doesn’t matter,” he concedes, before unexpectedly turning his disdain for the tradition into a gesture of humility. “OK. I’m just not that good of a writer – so I have to write about interesting things. If I was a wonderful prose writer, if I was a stylist, sure: I’d tell them who I had sex with and what I had for breakfast. But because I have never considered myself to be that good, I have to write about the most profound and confounding things out there.”

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 isn’t at all persuaded by the argument that it’s just “spicy autocomplete”. “When you have a mathematical system that can run language, you have the two most powerful things we have developed as a species working together: mathematics and language,” he says. “I think that we are absolutely on the verge of something, if not past the verge. 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 gotten so far is people telling me, ‘Your book gave me a panic attack. I started feeling bad. I couldn’t read it.’ Or, ‘I finished the book, and then I saw some AI headline and I had a panic attack.’ Well, come on! Books should give you a panic attack – or at least point you in that direction.”

• The Maniac is published in paperback by Pushkin. To support the Guardian and Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.