Another monumental dreamer who hunted down his vision regardless of the misery it caused him in his struggles with bigots and those in authority. It's funny how these people seem often to come in pairs: Kant and Schopenhauer, Copernicus and Kepler, Newton and Einstein, Freud and Jung, the first making the fundamental breakthrough and the second making important adjustments to the initial insight. Just a thought...

Puts Copernicus's discoveries in the context of his times and what times they were. He was well aware that he could have been fatally condemned for his heretical theories. Banville's erudite style finds a worthy subject and brings his fascinating story to life..

Poesía, metáfora y elegancia...Un texto muy fino y rico en detalles. Una personalidad enigmática y una revolución científica que desafió a la época....¡Majestuoso!
No me perderé a Newton y a Kepler...Banville tiene un estilo hermoso para abordar temas científicos de una forma sutil, armoniosa y encantadora....'Poesía científica para el corazón'....

Y concluyo las últimas páginas con un nudo en la garganta.....

I thought this was an amazing book up until the last 50 pages but definitely worth picking up. Doctor Copernicus is much more than a fictionalized bio - its about the agonizing process of creativity and censorship, but mostly it attempts and succeeds in describing "the thing itself," the galaxy without metaphor.

I was expecting an impenetrable read full of abstract mathematics, but was surprised at how readable and engrossed I was by this book. It's an intimate portrait of a timid, deferential man with a gifted mind living in dark, brutal times.

Did Banville once live in the 15th century? This strange look at the troubled world of Nicolas Koppernigk as he struggles to prove that the earth is not the center of the universe might have us believe so.

Mr. Banville is an extraordinary writer. This is not one of his better efforts.

I was bored at various intervals throughout and then gave up at 75%.
How does one make Copernicus tedious and completely uninteresting? By choosing to concentrate not on his scientific actions or much that happened in his life but on imagined neuroticism.
There were good things, when Copernicus felt emotions: as a child, next to Fracastoro, when treating the girl afflicted by syphilis. But then I was deprived even of that last remaining loveliness and stuck with the random narrator of part IV?
I’ve never read Banville before, and many reviews claim he is like Nabokov. Ugh, no, and I’m not even a big fan of Nabokov. But Banville’s writing while clear and sometimes riveting, just falls flat because of his shortcomings in plot. There’s not enough to propel it all forward.
Starting the book I thought: who in the world gets an idea to write novelistic accounts of the lives of not one but three scientific geniuses who are not exactly withering away in obscurity? A self-indulging writer, of course, is my answer after giving this a go.

Banville's voice is firm and confident here, with a command of his subject, and a knack for keeping the reader guessing by relying on increasingly unreliable narrators (particularly in part three with the amusingly self-deluded Rheticus). Banville's interest here is less with science itself than with the impact Copernicus' book would likely have on the Ptolemaic tradition and how more immediate (and dangerous) religious and political factions of the day might make use the book for their own ends. Banville's Copernicus is a man desperate to escape a commonplace world that refuses to let go of him. The final 'reveal,' as it were, is a slight disappointment (blaming an intellectual for basically 'missing the point of life'--Banville might have reached for something more original), but the journey to those final pages is rich and rewarding enough to make that a very minor concern.

The book was difficult to follow. The author seem to go into different tangents. I enjoyed because it gave us a perceptive of the Middle Ages we don't read about very often. The story showed us the hardships people lived through at the time. The book revealed the courage this man had in bucking the established church and beliefs of his time.

Periodi lunghi e complicati da rileggere spesso più volte. Largo uso di figure retoriche assurde. Pagine e pagine di descrizioni inutili di personaggi e ambienti che poco arricchivano la trama.
E poi atmosfere cupe, da medioevo più che da rinascimento. Utilizzo di personaggi tutti negativi, abietti, violenti e dissoluti. Forse un filosofo troverà più spunti di me nelle lunghe e contorte elucubrazioni; è già tanto che io sia arrivata alla fine!

This is one of the best books I've ever read, along with his Kepler - and I've read both more than once...
Banville, surely one of the finest writers in the English language, is not a historical novelist as such; rather he takes historical figures to work something out: what is knowledge? How is it arrived at? What leads to it, what hampers the finding of it, and how does new knowledge fit in society?
And of course the age-old question: does one discover, or invent?
In other words, is a scientist a creator?
If you've read Khun, Koestler, you will be familiar with these questions, albeit in a non-fictional way. The beauty, the uniqueness of Banville's trilogy (along with Kepler and Newton) is to frame those questions in a historical perspective - that is, adding the role of circumstances and contigency.
Paradigm shift, ok, but how?
All questions, by the way, that have become almost more relevant today than they were then...
There's no need to say anything about Banville's style, which is out of this world.
Further, I feel comments on historical accuracy are missing the point, and I can only recommend those people listen (or better: read) the immense Barry Unsworth talk about that very point (historical novels need not be about the past as a list of accurate details: they need to be about the now - just like good science-fiction). Type Unsworth + podcast, you'll see...
History here is a reminder of the power of ideologies (in a Marxist sense): Kepler, Copernicus, Newton had different approaches to knowledge - that is, truth, and its relation to its environment. That they don't handle their discovery in the same way reveals how the discourse about science changed, how the relationship between science and religion changed, and therefore how the role of the scientist changed.
This is one book in the trilogy: it's superb, it's a monument, but then again, so is the WHOLE trilogy. It's beautifully written, intellectually challenging, absolutely absorbing and intensely intelligent.
Read it - read it now.