Novelada vida del famoso astrónomo, que parece que fue de todo, y la astronomía era un pasatiempo. Este tipo de novela histórica, las busco con interés especial porque esa época no la tengo tan registrada (del 500 al 1700, digamos), sobre todo saber como era la subsistencia cotidiana, las costumbres, y las relaciones de poder, y era muy tentador verlo desde la vida de un hombre que revoluciono la manera de encarar lo científico.
Bueno, queda en esa promesa inicial porque después la novela se pincha un poco, porque si nos atenemos a la descripcio0n que hace Banville de Copérnico, era un ser bastante insípido y anodino. la vida le pasaba por el costado, y si llego a algún puesto importante fue por la ayuda de su tío, que con sus contactos le brindo una posición acomodada. Banville va contando sucesos históricos, intrigas de palacio, problemas familiares, y a todo esto Nicolás es indiferente, solo busca que no lo molesten.
Lo único que lo salva es su trabajo astronómico que va haciendo en secreto, que ni siquiera publico en vida por miedo a represalias de la iglesia y perder privilegios. Por lo demás, no parece un personaje que merezca una novela, Banville hace un esfuerzo encomiable.

In one sense, Nicolas Copernicus was a pure scientist. He studied and grew his scientific knowledge for its own sake, seemingly uninterested in achieving any kind of contemporary fame for himself while he was still alive. In John Banville’s wonderful historical novel, Doctor Copernicus, the protagonist also comes across as introverted, reserved, retiring, antisocial, and humble. None of this would have mattered much if Copernicus’s contribution towards pushing the boundaries of human knowledge were insignificant or modest at best. In fact, his work overturned mainstream thinking on a vital topic, which up to that point, had been inviolable.

Claudius Ptolemaeus, better known simply as Ptolemy, lived and died well over a thousand years before Copernicus. He was a mathematician, which meant in those days that you were perforce an astronomer. Ptolemy’s particular claim to fame was a geocentric theory of the planetary system, in which Earth was fixed and just about everything else orbited around it. His theory prevailed for over 1,400 years in a rare display of popular acceptance and belief by authorities that shaped conventional thinking, namely, the church and the scientific community.

Although Copernicus doesn’t exactly have a sudden epiphany of a heliocentric model of the planetary system (in which the Sun is central to all the orbiting planets), Banville leads readers to believe that, based on his own mathematics and observations, Copernicus could see that something just wasn’t right with the Ptolemaic model. He naturally documented all his work but his self-effacing nature generated sustained reluctance to publish.

The majority of Banville’s novel is a terrific feat of imagination, covering a condensed, cradle-to-grave biography of Copernicus from adolescence to age seventy. After being orphaned, Nicolas and his brother and two sisters were put in the care of an uncle. Given the times, only Nicolas and his brother Andreas were afforded an education at various academic institutions (one sister became a nun; the other fortunately married a businessman). While Nicolas showed a bent for serious learning, his brother was a wastrel with an appetite for fast living and loose women. Andreas also teased and tormented Nicolas throughout his life.

Ultimately, by his late thirties, Nicolas becomes secretary to his uncle, a duty which he performed with great diligence, but all the while star-gazing and working on his heliocentric hypothesis. Banville’s novel is rich in detail of what life was like in the late fifteenth-early sixteenth centuries. Readers are treated to authentic, atmospheric descriptions of food, drink, and hygiene habits, as well as of social systems and culture. The four-part story breaks its third-person narration in part three, when contemporary mathematician Georg Joachim Rheticus takes up the story in the first person. Through constant pleading and gentle badgering, he finally persuades Copernicus to publish De Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium (On the Revolutions of the Celestial Spheres).

Tragically, it is only on his death bed in 1543 that Copernicus learns of his well-received accomplishment. In Doctor Copernicus, Banville gives readers a stunning, layered, and memorable portrait of a good and decent man, and a remarkably intelligent scientist and scholar, albeit one with a humble and compulsive urge to hide his light under a bushel.

[Note: Doctor Copernicus is volume one in John Banville’s Revolutions Trilogy, the remaining two volumes being Kepler and The Newton Letter.]

Muy buena biografía novelada del astrónomo polaco cuyo modelo astronómico heliocéntrico revolucionó la visión del mundo hacia el siglo XVI. La novela de Banville encuentra lo mejor en la recreación de una época de transformaciones y de incertidumbres cuando la tierra y los cielos pasaban a ser distintos, y cuando la poderosa Iglesia romana asistía a la fractura luego del ascenso de Martín Lutero. Al tiempo que asistimos a ese proceso, la narración nos adentra en las vivencias de Copérnico, su origen familiar, sus dudas y sus miedos, las influencias que lo marcan y se detiene en el camino que debió recorrerse hasta la publicación de sus textos. El relato no precisa de artificios ya que le cede el debido lugar a una vida y una producción teórica que hizo que un nuevo tiempo comenzara a asomarse en la Europa del siglo XVI.

Wow - what a roller coaster. Language brilliant and obscure, at times impenetrable. Some of the characters are painful - I never wanted to see Andreas and was pleased when he departed for Italy. His return in the final pages was gruelling. Not too heavy about Copernicus' theory. I'm forward to reading some more Banville.

I liked this book immensely; it has been on my shelves for years, but Banville is reading at Brown toward the end of the month, and so I decided to work through my holdings.

He is a superb stylist and an extraordinarily observer/imaginer of human foibles. Even at this relatively early stage (1976), he shows wide reading and close attention to some of his Irish literary forebears like Joyce and Beckett. He acknowledges the research into and sources of Copernicus's life, but the off-center "heliocentric" vision credited to NC in this novel suggests a sense of the abyss within that would do Sartre proud.

My one reservation, though I do not wish to stress it, is that the consciousness of the various characters does not, to me, seem distinctive to them but, rather, might better reflect an authorial narrator.

The life of Nicholas Copernicus, Catholic bishop (?) and astronomer who publicises the controversial theory that the sun is the centre of the solar system. Nicholas' mother dies at an early age, and after his father also dies he is cared for by a Bishop uncle, and lives alongside his fun-loving, malicious older brother.

Difficult although a short book.

"Scritto bene" è riduttivo. Banville fa un uso artistico e acrobatico della lingua, finalmente un anglofono che non si limita al subject+verb+object e scrive frasi di cinque righe.

Review in progress.

This was one of the lousiest books that I've read in a long long time.Absolute drek.The writing was completely indecipherable. I swear I felt like I needed a machete to get thru all the tangled up phrases and overgrown terminology to find out just what the hell this guy was trying to say.I learned nothing- less that nothing - about Copernicus. Except this- I learned that he was a really dull and boring guy-I learned that that he knew enough to hang onto his day job while daydreaming about the universe. I learned that his brother died from syphilis- (which if I have it right everyone and his mother died from Syphilis in the 1500's) and I learned that it rained a lot around the Baltic Sea.You think I'm being snippy? I swear I'm not. This book after you take away the ridiculous pomposity of the writing- left absolutely nothing.Nothing to learn. Nothing to feel. BUPKIS. NOTHING. A whole pile of frilly words and frillier tangled up phrases that got you nowhere- except into a really lousy mood for having wasted your time on such an overblown,over inflated piece of drek. This guy Banville - how do people like that become writers?He doesn't say anything. He stands in front of the mirror and oogles and awws at himself.He is just completely taken with himself.- which would be alright - if he could write a book while doing all that. As it is this is just one big lovey dovey note to himself-about how smart .. how REALLY really smart he is. Got nothing to do with Copernicus. Don't read it. It' s a waste of time. JM

It's Banville, but somehow he's not quite Banville yet. You mostly read him for the prose, and as with all of his work it's expertly constructed here. But it also feels a little dry; it doesn't sing like his later work. Another part of it is the subject matter, which seems an odd fit for his writing style. In Banville's defense, he approaches it in his own unique, oblique, fractured way, seemingly sidestepping essentially every expectation you might have of a historical novel (or literary biography). But he mostly narrates it in third person which I think plays away from his strengths, except for the third section. There he uses a deluded, unreliable, self-hating, megalomaniacal narrator, a harbinger of essentially every Banville narrator to come. In other areas you can also see his pet themes and character types start to work their way in. At times the novel feels almost more like a dry run for later novels than a fully-realized work of its own.

But even with those flaws, there's enough of his future brilliance to make it a worthwhile read. Pre-prime Banville is still Banville.

“Stars or torches, it is all one, all merely an exalted naming; those lights shine on, indifferent to what we call them.”

HE REVOLUTIONIZED OUR VIEW OF THE UNIVERSE

For nearly fifteen hundred years Europeans regarded the Roman-Egyptian astronomer Claudius Ptolemy (100-170) as the ultimate authority on humanity’s understanding of the universe. He viewed the Earth as the center of the universe. The moon, the planets, the sun, and the stars circled around it in concentric circles. It was not until the turbulent years of the Reformation in the sixteenth century that a contrary view took hold.

Then, a German-speaking Polish astronomer named (in Latin) Nicolaus Copernicus (1473-1543) postulated a new model of the universe. For him, the sun was at the center, and the Earth one of the planets that circled it. To the scholars of the age, the Copernican theory was revolutionary. It deeply influenced the later work of Galileo Galilei, Johannes Kepler, and Isaac Newton, presaging our understanding of the universe in the twenty-first century.

Now here, in Doctor Copernicus, the Irish Booker Prize-winning author John Banville gives him his due in a short, fictionalized Copernicus biography. It’s the first of three books in his Revolutions Trilogy, which also includes Kepler and Newton.

A GERMAN-SPEAKING ASTRONOMER IN MARTIN LUTHER’S TIME

He was born Nicolaus Koppernigk in 1473 of German-speaking parents in his mother’s Polish home town. They were wealthy merchants on both sides of the family, though his mother’s was of noble stock. The boy was exceptionally bright and, from an early age, his Uncle Lucas. a Canon of the Church, singles him out for the priesthood. As a student he gravitates toward mathematics and astronomy.

When still a teenager, he detects the flaws—and there are many—in Ptolemy’s concept of the universe. Over the course of his life, he gradually begins to share with friends and sympathetic teachers his evolving contrary view of the solar system. But everywhere he turns there is fierce resistance. And as he grows older, and gains an elevated position as Canon Koppernigk, the criticism grows more virulent. Outspoken enemies bedevil him everywhere. His sadistic brother Andreas and his uncle, now a Prince-Bishop in Polish Prussia, are first among them. And his masterwork, De revolutionibus orbium coelestium (On the Revolutions of the Celestial Spheres), remains unpublished. The work sees the light of day only as he lies on his deathbed. And it is a Lutheran who arranges it, introducing it as an anti-Catholic text—a lamentable fate for a devout Canon of the Church.

HIS MASTERWORK PUBLISHED ONLY AS HE LIES ON HIS DEATHBED

Doctor Copernicus is oddly structured. The first two of the book’s four chapters present a straightforward fictional account of the man’s life, written in the third person. The third consists of letters sent to, from, and about Canon Koppernigk. And the fourth is the story of the astronomer’s final decline in the voice of a mad Lutheran student from Germany, who pesters Koppernigk relentlessly for weeks for permission to publish De Revolutionibus. Listening to the audio edition of this novel, I found the change of pace and format especially jarring. And the narrator made the experience worse by voicing almost every character other than Koppernigk himself in a nasal, sneering tone. If I do later decide to read the Kepler and Newton volumes that follow Doctor Copernicus, it will certainly not be their audio editions if the same narrator is at work. However, I must admit that, as always, Banville’s prose is glorious. He has long been known as one of the most celebrated stylists in the English language.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

John Banville was born in Wexford, Ireland, in 1945 and educated locally. He did not attend university. He published his first novel at the age of twenty-six in 1971. The Revolutions Trilogy (Doctor Copernicus, Kepler, and The Newton Letter) followed from 1976 to 1982. Since then, he has published a total of twenty-one novels under his own name as well as the nine novels of the Quirke series under his pseudonym, Benjamin Black. Banville is widely considered to be a contender for the Nobel Prize for Literature. He lives in Dublin.

Pesado y aburrido, lo que se dice un pestiño. Latoso y difícil de entender, no me ha aprovechado nada, ni la vida del protagonista ni la época que vivió. Un libro para olvidar. No debí terminarlo, pero no es muy extenso, 282 páginas, y tenía la esperanza de encontrar algún pasaje interesante.