According to the night gardener, the Mapuche Indians would crush the skeletons of their vanquished enemies and spread that dust on their farms as fertilizer, always working in the dead of night, when the trees are fast asleep, for they believed that some of them — the canelo and the araucaria, the monkey puzzle — could see into a warrior’s soul, steal his deepest secrets and spread them through the shared roots of the forest, where plush tendrils whispered to pale mushroom mycelium, ruining his standing before the community.
When We Cease to Understand the World, p. 182
In the Acknowledgments, Benjamin Labatut describes When We Cease to Understand the World as “a work of fiction based on real events. The quantity of fiction grows throughout the book; whereas Prussian Blue contains only one fictional paragraph, I have taken greater liberties in the subsequent texts, while still trying to remain faithful to the scientific concepts discussed in each of them.”
Wow, just wow.
Kanlaon 