A review by lizshayne
The MANIAC by Benjamín Labatut

challenging dark mysterious sad slow-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? Character
  • Strong character development? It's complicated
  • Loveable characters? No
  • Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.0

Having read When We Cease to Understand the World, this book was less of an overwhelmingly weird experience, but it was still very strange and preoccupied with similar questions about the moment when math (and so arguably science) stopped being being beautiful and became (only) terrifying.

It's interesting to meet characters I knew only through their research as people and it's another perspective on WWII and the holocaust because this is also, somehow, a Holocaust book. (I mean, it's the 20th century, there are Jews, they're in Europe, there's only so much it can be avoided.) But the premise of the book, the argument it does not so much advance as play with: at a certain point, an encounter with technology from a person who begins to grasp what is going on behind it will break.

Also, this book does answer the question of where autistic people were. In European science departments, apparently.