Thank you, it is a very beautiful narrative....

This is an incredible book. It is superb. Banville shows himself to be a great master here -- a worthy disciple of Joyce. I'm not even kidding -- I seldom write praise like that. But he isn't Joycean, at least, not style wise so much. Which is good. It's not derivative. But it does remind me very strongly of Portrait, a bildungsroman written with inspiration, love and blood.

The prose is lovely, but that's not the end of it. Excellent narrative techniques too. More than that, the research done for the book is extremely impressive. Like all great books, it addresses big questions in philosophy and science.

But the most important thing about it is that it doesn't feel forced. The greatness does not smack of a writer who's had one too many creative writing classes or English lessons, and is trying to put them into effect. Or even a writer (there are a few) who started off with some philosophical essay and attempted to get across the points in book form because of some assumptions regarding aesthetics and affect. It is written with ineluctable love, irony and pity.

"an infinitely gentle, infinitely suffering thing"

a hard grind

Very hard to finish. The writing was lovely but the content always dark and unrelenting.
Not sure how much is a true story either, if any.

I really liked the early portions of this book: Copernicus is clearly a very different, individual thinker, and his perceptions of things and people, his frequent in ability to understand them, as well as his joy in ideas, was fascinating. The later portions, especially the third section, narrated by "Rhetoricus", a young astronomer who tried to get him to publish, were frustrating -- not only because his narrative voice was less appealing, but because the historical fact that Copernicus hemmed and hawed and postponed publishing is narratively frustrating.

As dark as his work is John Banville is still one of my favorite writers. This book is no exception and surely not the account you read in school.

Boring in a lot of ways. There are some nice moments--and good technique--however, once the plot gets engaging the story shifts to something else.

I’d only read one book by John Banville before: his celebrated novel The Sea, which I read on a balmy summer day, propped up against a grassy bank by the Serpentine in Hyde Park. It was an occasion when place and book complemented each other perfectly and I found myself lost in Banville’s heady, languid writing. When I stumbled across this book, I was delighted: not only because it gave me a chance to lose myself again, but because it’s always refreshing to find a book set in one of the less familiar periods of history. When you think of the ubiquity of Tudor, Roman or Victorian-set historical fiction, the first decades of the 16th century in Prussia, Poland and the Baltic states are relatively uncharted territory. I was also keen to find out a bit more about Copernicus, because I am aware of the Ptolemaic and Copernican systems only in the broadest sense and I hoped that the novel would make me better acquainted with the details of Copernicus’s theory...

For full details, please see my blog:
https://theidlewoman.net/2013/04/07/d...

Highly recommended. Very enjoyable

End of year housecleaning. Had to circle back to this first book of "The Revolutions Trilogy" by John Banville that I had started and stopped over the years more than once. I loved and hated it. It deals with genius, extremes of beliefs and societal pressures, glorious descriptions of the natural world as inspiration for original thinking in fear of prejudice by the religious tenets of the late 1400's to mid 1500's. Instead of receiving reward, each new concept was cruelly mocked. It is the sympathetic part of me that found this book to be so difficult. Glad I circled back again and won't need to carry over an unfinished trilogy into 2022.

Biographical Fiction, Historical Fiction, Literary Fiction

Pasó lo habitual: con cien páginas menos hubiera funcionado mejor. Parece que mientras se distrae con un montón de descripciones, se le escapan determinados apuntes de ese cisma entre católicos y protestantes. También encuentro descuidado el papel investigador del protagonista, como si no fuera las investigaciones astronómicas que le dieron nombre no fueran relevantes.

4.25 - A gripping and fascinating tale of the great astronomer told with lyrical, detailed beauty.