Kepler by Banville, John

Boston. 1983. Godine. 1st American Edition. Very Good in Slightly Worn Dustjacket. 0879234385. 197 pages. hardcover. Jacket illustration by James Marsh. Jacket & title calligraphy by Julian Waters. FROM THE PUBLISHER - ‘From the start John Banville had tremendous linguistic resource, an appetite for ideas, a relish of people and periods. KEPLER is a novel of great scope, written with deepened authority a jubilant achievement that further secures this writer’s reputation as the most exciting and ambitious Young novelist in Ireland today.’ - Seamus Heaney Johannes Kepler, born in 1571 in a south German town, was one of the World’s master mathematicians and astronomers. His work laid the foundation on which his successors, notably Isaac Newton, built the modern Picture of the universe that held till Einstein. Kepler was a product of that long breakdown of the late medieval World that became the Renaissance, a World seething with change that John Banville magically renders in this vibrant novel. He excels, as only a true novelist can, in conjuring the noisy burlesque, the comic muddle, the ludicrous intractability of life. A sickly child, born in Poverty and squalor, Kepler was to compare himself to a mangy dog, ready to Whine and grovel yet quick to bite the hands of the mighty whose servant he had to be. But this mocking self-portrait leaves out his genius, his humor, and his steady sense of scientific purpose. It was his destiny to decode the secret of the mathematical harmony of the spheres in a world utterly unprepared to accept the meaning of his discovery. Bullied by his first mentor, the Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe, Spurned by Galileo, kept as a plaything by three successive German emperors, Kepler held fast to his vision. Kepler emerges from the disorder of his age as a thoroughly modern hero; an outsider in his own generation yet one moved by a higher purpose. Out of the ignorance, hypocrisy, and misery of his time, Kepler dug out a truth; and in Banville’s hands it all becomes an enormously heroic, exuberant, and triumphant story. JOHN BANVILLE was born in Wexford, Ireland, in 1945. His first book, LONG LANKIN, was published in 1970, and was followed by NIGHTSPAN a year later. A third novel, BIRCHWOOD, published in 1973 won the Allied Irish Banks prize in that year, and was also awarded a Macaulay Fellowship by the Irish Arts Council. In 1967 he won the American-Irish Foundation Literary Award, and in 1976 his DOCTOR COPERNICUS was awarded the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for the best work of fiction published in that year. Banville’s THE NEWTON LETTER, a contemporary novel, published in London in 1982 to wide acclaim, will appear under the Godine imprint. inventory #1183 ISBN: 0879234385.