Uncanny trees

Bad dreams, an eclipse, Benjamín Labatut's When We Cease to Understand the World

There’s such a thing as death by overabundance.

A lemon tree bows under the weight of its own fruit at the end of Benjamín Labatut’s When We Cease to Understand the World. A gardener serves as the book’s final character. He tends to the lemons and counsels a neighbor about death as an irruption of the present upon past and future both. He tells us he on…