The MANIAC (2023)by Benjamin Labatut

 Book Review

The MANIAC (2023)

by Benjamin Labatut

    There is no doubt that Latin American literature, comprised of writers from South America, Central America, Mexico and the Caribbean, comprise one of the most vibrant canons in world literature.  I'm talking 20th century, here.  Within that world Chile isn't exactly a backwater- with two Nobel Prize winning poets (Mistral and Neruda) and contemporary author Isabelle Allende broadly known to a world audience, but the fiction scene has taken off- alongside Argentina- in terms of international attention.  Labatut.  His last book- When We Cease to Understand the World- was published in 2021 to international acclaim- it was shortlisted both for the International Booker where it lost to David Diop- which is like, fair enough, and the National Book Award for Translated Literature where it lost to Winter in Sokcho by Elisa Dusapin- which I never read.  

  When We Cease to Understand the World was distinctive both in terms of the technique- which featured heavy doses of scientific theory alongside more conventional novelistic concerns like the price of genius.  It was... a heady mix... and if it wasn't quite a la mode in terms of the subject matter, personally, I loved it. I'm pointing that out because The MANIAC- the capitalization reflects the fact that Maniac is an acronym for an early computer- is a similar blend of heavy scientific fact with a novelists grasp of personality and the international audience for literary fiction. 

     Specifically, The MANIAC picks up at the dawn of the computer age, in the aftermath of the tremendous power required to run the equations to invent the atomic bomb. The MANIAC is a real computer- built at the Los Alamos laboratory and weighing in excess of 1000 pounds, it was the first device that allowed the idea of artificial intelligence to be expressed.  

     It is pretty esoteric stuff, obviously, but I was struck when one of the characters actually said that the The MANIAC used 5 kilobytes of RAM, which is like... a jpeg today. This was the first computer to beat a human in a game of any kind- not chess.   Like When We Cease to Understand the World, Labatut glides through time- which- I might add, is an incredibly savvy story telling technique because the shift in focus prevents character burn-out with the reader.  You get all these chapters of the lives of these brilliant wierdos, but they come in and then exit the frame.  I think that is the element of Labatut's writing that puts him on the edge of actually winning one of these major in translation awards.

   His tour de force is his last chapter about the attempts (succesful) to make an AI that could beat a top world player at the game of GO which is known in a diminutive (and I now realize nearly comical) form in America as Othello- we are such BARBARIANS how they must laugh at us for that.  The point is that GO is fantastically complicated- makes Chess look like a kids book is the idea.  Labatut tells this story- which has a similar shape and feel to a lengthy Harper's or New Yorker piece- but there is such a pay off at the end it made me feel like I was reading a work of great literature- something really profound.  No spoilers on the revelation contained, but wow.