Hello again, Book Burners!
On this fifth episode of Books Are Burning!, my sometime co-author G.J. Villa and I conclude our discussion of Benjamín Labatut’s When We Cease to Understand the World with an analysis of “The Night Gardener,” the fifth and final section of the book. “The Night Gardener” opens with the description of “a vegetable plague” which is destroying trees in the narrator’s Chilean village—a detail which reminds us that the original Spanish title of Labatut’s book is Un Verdor Terrible, or A Terrible Verdure. This in turns hearkens back to the “green gas” mentioned in the first section of When We Cease to Understand the World—the chlorine gas which Fritz Haber, who also invented nitrogen fertilizers, created for use by the German military in World War I. The green background of the graphic above represents this verdor terrible which is emphasized in the original title of the book.
Stay tuned for upcoming episodes on the Proust Questionnaire and Wole Soyinka’s Of Africa, as well as a special author interview.
MW
P.S. BAB! #4 has been posted to my YouTube channel:
"The Night Gardener" - Benjamín Labatut's "When We Cease to Understand the World" (5/5)