The Maniac

"I’m particularly excited about The Maniac by Benjamín Labatut, a Chilean writer whose first book When We Cease to Understand the World was so powerfully written it made me want to go for a lie down after only a few paragraphs. (A good thing, in my opinion, although I appreciate it’s not for everyone.) That book, written in Spanish and translated by Adrian Nathan West, was shortlisted for the International Booker Prize in 2021 . The Maniac is Labatut’s first novel in English, and as with that earlier book, it exists in a conceptual hinterland somewhere between fiction and nonfiction, plaiting the two together in a deeply disconcerting manner that reflects Labatut’s preoccupation with scientists whose brilliance and obsession lead them to the very edges of sanity. This new book explores the birth of artificial intelligence and the terrifying, godlike powers it might represent. Unmissable. And—can I really include this in a round-up of ‘novels’? I’m going to, sorry—Emily Wilson’s translation of The Iliad is an eagerly awaited follow-up to her 2017 translation of The Odyssey (described by The Guardian as “a cultural landmark”). Wilson, a previous Five Books interviewee , has written interestingly elsewhere about her fresh and contemporary approach to the epic; here she is in the Washington Post , for example, explaining five artistic decisions she made in selecting vocabulary. I also enjoyed this profile of the translator in The New Yorker —you might too ."