The Maniac by Benjamin Labatut - Review
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 5 ม.ค. 2025
- A review of The Maniac by Benjamin Labatut.
From one of contemporary literature’s most exciting new voices, a haunting story centered on the Hungarian polymath John von Neumann, tracing the impact of his singular legacy on the dreams and nightmares of the twentieth century and the nascent age of AI
Benjamín Labatut’s When We Cease to Understand the World electrified a global readership. A Booker Prize and National Book Award finalist, and one of the New York Times’ Ten Best Books of the Year, it explored the life and thought of a clutch of mathematicians and physicists who took science to strange and sometimes dangerous new realms. In The MANIAC, Labatut has created a tour de force on an even grander scale.
A prodigy whose gifts terrified the people around him, John von Neumann transformed every field he touched, inventing game theory and the first programable computer, and pioneering AI, digital life, and cellular automata. Through a chorus of family members, friends, colleagues, and rivals, Labatut shows us the evolution of a mind unmatched and of a body of work that has unmoored the world in its wake.
The MANIAC places von Neumann at the center of a literary triptych that begins with Paul Ehrenfest, an Austrian physicist and friend of Einstein, who fell into despair when he saw science and technology become tyrannical forces; it ends a hundred years later, in the showdown between the South Korean Go Master Lee Sedol and the AI program AlphaGo, an encounter embodying the central question of von Neumann's most ambitious unfinished project: the creation of a self-reproducing machine, an intelligence able to evolve beyond human understanding or control.
A work of beauty and fabulous momentum, The MANIAC confronts us with the deepest questions we face as a species.
Just want to say the cover was designed using Dalle-2 which ties in with the theme of the book. There are clever foreshadowing/ breadcrumbs in each page of his book to the main themes. But I do admit, When We Cease had a bigger impact on me after read than The Maniac. Maybe because like you said, I know more about some of the source material. But that itself is a sign of good writing for him to write fictionalized accounts of real people that add don't contradict with our general knowledge of them. Or a few times, add depth. Also, this book wasn't translated from Spanish like When. Also, considering this is his second novel, I'm excited for his future books (hoping for one on Ramon y Cajal and Cognitive Science).
Excellent review. I read The Maniac and also WWCTUTW; I agree with your criticism. I really enjoyed the novel, especially the way in which von Neumann's brilliance was displayed. The book made me think.
I am Chilean, and I am interested in reading this book because a recent situation in the Chilean government involved an accusation of rape between one of our authorities and a subordinate. So, let's give this book a shot.
I think you just saved me a lot of time, so thank you!
Ha! Happy to help Greg. Although, I think I might be in the minority with my option on this one.
I'm half way through another book that keeps popping-up on best of 2023 lists...The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store, and i'm absolutely loving it. Have you started it / read it? ive seen you talk about it but may have missed if you've read it (been super busy at work so not had much time to watch book tube... so may have missed if you've read it)
@@rororeads I'm on page 218 of Heaven & Earth Grocery Store! I'm really liking it so far. I hope you are also enjoying it!
I can appreciate what you're saying here. I read his WWCTUTW and given all the praise it was getting I couldn't help thinking it was a bit cheap- it reads just as a scrapbook of interesting biographic tidbits about famous physicists which he'd presumably largely just lifted out of various biographies and articles. It was well put together but I definitely didnt think it desrved the International Booker, which it nearly won
Something very important to keep in mind is that it's not tidbits since many of them aren't true. Each section increasingly uses more and more fiction to tell the story, but it keeps the same register so it reads like a collection of facts. But it isn't. The first chapter is mostly true, except for one sentence. From there, fiction is inserted more and more until you get to the last section that is almost entirely fiction. EXCEPT for the science. That's as accurate as you can expect without getting too technical.
It's a fiction novel that uses the register of non-fiction to tell a story about consequence, epiphany, obsession. I would say that's why it almost won.
@tituspullo294 great explanation yes I had a feeling that I had just breezed through it. It will be an easy reread sometime perhaps as it's only short. Have you read any Alan Lightman? You sound like you would enjoy him
After the Go completion the computer program was rebuilt, stripping away all the inputs of games played by previous masters. Only the rules of Go remained.The new program, AlphaGo zero, played itself and “relearned“ the game. This was my favorite part.
Loved the alphago documentary. Lee Sedol’s reaction to his loss was gutting. It must have been like finding out the sun doesn’t go around the earth.
Bummer to hear that this didn't work for you. Sounds like an interesting subject, but just not really handled in the best way. I'll bump it down on the list a bit.
I think I enjoyed The Maniac a tad more than you, but you articulated well what I felt but could not formulate into words. This was not a "story", in the sense that the novel does not sweep you into a plot composed of characters composed of their experiences, that compels your emotions to sputter and sway along with it. Instead, it was an embellished, sometimes exciting, very often interesting, set of facts. We are left with a non-fiction book that is "juiced" with a little sprinkle of fiction, making a "novel". Is that better than just the non-fiction straight? Before your video I would have said it was worth it for The Maniac, but now I am more doubtful.
I love Labatut more than you and the key to reading Labatut is to know that his novels are more non-fiction than fiction. I do not expect to connect to any of the characters (most of them are Nobel laureates!). Cover art is deceiving since in von Neumann's life Manhattan project was just one chapter of his life.
Yeah, I definitely went in thinking it would explore the fiction more than fact or maybe find an equal balance. I hope the review doesn’t make it sound like i didn’t enjoy it, I really did and will be reading anything he writes next. Thanks for watching :)
Excellent review. Your dislikes were my dislikes. I think I liked When We Cease to Understand the World better. And it was shorter.