What do You think about Kepler (1993)?
"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 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)
—Graziano
This is pretty awful. Banville pulled his interpretation of Kepler more or less completely from Arthur Koestler's Sleepwalkers (including the heaping pile of misogyny; there is zero historical evidence that Kepler didn't want to marry his first wife), chucks out all the science, and throws in a soothsaying dwarf, some unrequited intrafamily love, and a whole bunch of imaginary bellyaching about Galileo. Kepler as presented here isn't particular religious but he's new-agey as can be, navel gazing about the desire to "live", reflecting on the nature of happiness and childhood, and just adding a few requisite asides about chaos-of-the-world, harmony-of-the-spheres so you remember who you're reading about. The middle section of the book, written as fictionalized letters that actually reflect to some degree Kepler's actual letters, is by far the best part and is even occasionally moving. Things get much worse when Banville ignores the source material and gets creative.
—Tlaura
Wish I could give it 3.5 stars; Kepler is well worth reading but I'm not mad about it. First, as others have pointed out, Banville is first of all a very skilled wordsmith. There are moments of imagery and description that simply knock one's socks off. Second, the woven structure is quite engaging. throughout the reader is inside Kepler's brain which is quite an interesting place marrying quite unexpectedly the banal with the marvelous. Kepler talks to himself, dreams, worries, aches for his heart's desire--finding a mathematical expression for the harmony of the universe (talk about having big goals!), all while grappling with the endless difficulty of day to day life in the seventeenth century: family (his mother tried for a witch), children and wives dying, plague and a myriad of other untreatable illnesses, lice, cold, straw mattresses, his stomach and bowels, money, the endless damp and cold, not to mention the miseries of years and years of religious war and being a court dependent--(an you believe? The emperor of Bohemia kept of a royal mathematician)--not that he was regularly paid. Through it all Kepler travels--walking, riding donkeys, you name it, but it was slow and uncomfortable (no wonder most people stayed at home)--around and around central Europe looking for sponsors, for colleagues, for "observations," his traveling mirroring the restless of his brain as he hunts for elegant solutions to the complex problems he set himself. Moments of happiness occur and are noted. It's all rather nicely woven together--actually rather a feat to stuff this all into under 200 pages--though I'm still thinking about that set of letters. Here is a view of the underside of what it feels like to be world famous, to be doomed to live the life of driven intellectual.
—Linda Howe Steiger
