Kepler

Johannes Kepler wants to unite the heavens in a glorious mathematical and astronomical harmony, and he has the genius to do that very thing. Everything else about his life is out of tune, from his own abrasive personality to his marriage and his religion, as well as his reliance on wealthy patrons to fund his scientific endeavours and with whom he is always at odds or out of step.

I think Banville's books are less about either the explicated sciences or the accurate biographies of these men, but about their hidden inner lives as they grapple with the huge questions of the universe and discover that they can gain knowledge but not meaning or understanding, and they are forced to question the worth of this undertaking when set against the show more banal vicissitudes of life and the looming certainty of death. show less

Banville continues his exploration of brilliant scientists whose fleeting moments of rational lucidity allow them to pierce the cages made of religious identities and superstitions that they inhabit. This novel is not as successful as its predecessor, Doctor Copernicus, as the cultural impact of Kepler's discoveries are still rather opaque to me. Clearly the Copernican revolution had tremendous implications for humans who thought they were at the center of the universe, but I am not sure why Kepler's insights (e.g. planetary orbits are elliptical) would matter a whole lot to spiritual and political authorities. Judging from this novel, elites just saw astronomers as playthings, kind of like how Jeffrey Epstein saw the superstar show more academics he collected. Kepler the character is not terribly interesting--he is rather passive as his life is buffeted by the political and religious strife of Renaissance-era Germany. show less

Fictional account of the later life of Kepler, including his frustrations with money, his family, the suffocating religious politics of the time, Tyco Brahe, and of course, the motion of the planets.
It is an early Banville, part of a trilogy about scientists. Well-written, not overly expansive, and historically interesting.
I had this on Audible and the book suffered. The reader was of the William Shatner school of drama, which is to say he relied on volume and odd pacing to carry the drama and tension. It was often distracting and occasionally I had to quit listening altogether. Probably hurt my rating of the book

When I think about the great scientific minds of the distant past, I always imagine them constantly occupied with their lofty pursuits and all their needs somehow provided. Banville puts the reader right inside Kepler's mind which is so often caught up in the petty details of life, his unhappy marriage, deaths of his children, the constant search for a patron and money. But then occasionally you get a glimpse of his genius which leads him to look again at what was known about geometry and astronomy at the time. His Kepler sees the physical world and the people around him as alien and usually hostile. When he stops to take a look around, he is always an observer, never a participant. He lacks the most basic social skills. Yet there are show more those who see his genius and give him the time to do his work. Banville is an amazing writer and gives a good sense of life at the turn of the seventeenth century. show less

Living in the Renaissance, a person of intelligence must have been perpetually anxious, annoyed, or exasperated, except for occasional moments of intellectual triumph and the times when love lightened one's emotional landscape and infinitely complicated it. At least, that was the experience of Johannes Kepler as imagined in John Banville's emotionally convincing novel.

Banville's prose is exhuberantly multisyllabic and conveys the sense of disdainful sarcasm mingled with ambition and obsessive accuracy in observing the world around him that he attributes to Kepler. In the fever of creation, however, Banville can be insensitive to his readers. For example, he creates unnecessary confusion by referring to a character variously by his first show more name, last name, position, or nationality during the course of a few paragraphs, leaving us struggling to keep track of who it is that he's talking about.

Part IV consists of letters written by the Kepler character, presented out of chronological order. This is less confusing than it sounds, but it left me wondering why these presumably fictional letters couldn't have been constructed in a way that supported Banville's thematic needs while preserving a more natural narrative flow. Kepler struggled all his life to reconcile his religious belief that the order of the physical universe reflected the divine order of the Christian god with his common sense conviction that the universe was indeed physical and conformed to the proven laws of physics. Is Banville trying to tell us that Kepler was so wrong in this that even the story of his own life could not be properly told without upsetting the natural flow of time? show less

What I can say? It was my first Banville book and it won't be the last. We experience Kepler's Angst...

"Com'era innocente, com'era inutilmente amabile la superficie del mondo! Il mistero delle cose semplici lo assali'. Una festiva rondine sfreccio' attraverso una scompigliante folata di fumo di lavanda. Avrebbe piovuto di nuovo. gli giunse il suono di una corda pizzicata. Sorrise, in ascolto: era forse la musica delle sfere?" (p. 71)

"Cosa aveva guidato suo padre? Quali voglie impossibili si erano agitate e avevan dato calci dentro di lui? E che cosa? Il pestare di piedi durante le marce? il puzzo penetrante della paura e dell'attesa sul campo di battaglia, all'alba? il calore bruto e il delirio di qualche locanda lungo la strada? Era possibile amare la mera azione, il brivido di un fare incessante? Dinanzi ai suoi occhi tristemente show more meditativi ricomparve la finestra. Questo era il mondo: quel giardino, i suoi figli, quei papaveri. Sono una piccola creatura, il mio orizzonte e' ristretto. Allora, come una improvvisa inondazione di gelida acqua, venne il pensiero della morte, essa stringeva in pugno un mondo di spada arrugginita." (p. 108)

"Il cerchio e' il portatore delle armonie pure, le pure armonie sono innate nell'anima, e cosi' anima e cerchio sono una cosa sola.
Che semplicita', che bellezza." (p. 192)

"La ragione per cui certi rapporti producono un accordo ed altri una dissonanza non e' comunque da ricercarsi nella aritmetica, bensi' nella geometria ..." (p. 193) show less