Historical fiction can be such a dustbin -- frustrated historians trying to imagine details they cannot dig up, frustrated novelists turning to history to find the stories they cannot imagine. That's why "Kepler" is a pleasant surprise. Both literate and accurate, it brings to life that perilous balance between science and pseudo-science that Kepler and his contemporaries shifted. I strongly recommend it to anyone interested in astronomy or the history of science. Or just a good novel. And I'm pleased to note that it's a trilogy.

Amazing book. This is what a stylist looks like in writing. Banville is an astonishing writer, he describes more Kepler's personal emotions, life, and relationships, rather than dwelling on his scientific achievements. This leads to a more thoughtful and more ambitious approach to one of the greatest minds in human history. "Never die, never die," that last line of the book will stay with me.

What to say about a book like this? Clearly very well written. Clearly a fascinating time. But so hard to read about a bunch of people who are all so obnoxious.

Kepler is the second book in The Revolutions Trilogy by John Banville, occupying the middle slot between Doctor Copernicus and The Newton Letter. It tells the story of Johannes Kepler (1571-1630), who, at various times, wore career hats of teacher, astronomer, mathematician, and even astrologer. The late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries were tough times: living conditions and sanitary standards were fairly primitive, and city infrastructure was practically nonexistent. The result of this was poor health and short life expectancies, courtesy of rampant diseases and illnesses that lacked scientific treatments. Kepler himself died at age 58 having suffered a variety of health challenges.

As with Doctor Copernicus, Banville expertly recreates the atmosphere of the times in Bohemia, and in particular, the fragile living that was often the fate of men and women of science. Unless one was lucky enough to get a plum teaching position at a prestigious university, the only other option was to secure a wealthy patron. After Kepler loses his teaching position, he finds a patron in Tycho Brahe, a somewhat unprofessional, vain, self-interested, scientist. Brahe’s fixation—a useful one, as it turns out—was tabulating accurate astronomical readings. In Banville’s book, at any rate, he was single-dimensioned in his area of interest.

Banville portrays Kepler in a way that invites sympathy for the man. The vicissitudes of Kepler’s life, in domestic and professional domains, kept him on a rollercoaster of ups and downs. In his professional capacity, Kepler couldn’t seem to hang on to obliging patrons. In Banville’s book, it seems that Tycho Brahe wasn’t diligent in paying Kepler, or indeed, caring about anything to do with how Kepler was supposed to live. After Brahe died, Kepler was lucky enough to find a new patron in the form of Emperor Rudolf II, who exemplified the typical twofold problem with patrons: they knew little about the science, but thought they knew a lot. Kepler was Imperial Mathematician, and he desperately hung on to that position even with Rudolf’s two successor Kings of Bohemia, Matthias and Ferdinand.

Domestically, Kepler also had a rough, troublesome time. His first wife, Barbara, surprisingly for the times, brought her own money into the marriage. That didn’t stop her from constantly bickering with Kepler about getting paid by his patrons in a timely fashion. They lost two children in infancy, then managed to successfully bring three more into the world, of which only one succumbed to a fatal illness. After his first wife died, Kepler married again, this time to a woman almost half his age. Their first three children died in infancy, then three more managed to reach adulthood. Though this was a happier marriage, one can’t help but believe that losing five children in infancy was a huge emotional trauma for parents.

Despite much preoccupation with domestic tribulations. Kepler managed to contribute meaningfully to branches of science that included, astrology, optics, mathematics, and physics. Unlike Copernicus, the reluctant publisher of his work while he lived, Kepler vigorously pursued publishing his discoveries. The one he will probably be remembered for is overturning the then-believed theory of circular orbits of the planets around the sun, when in fact, they orbit elliptically.

Banville’s writing in rich and textured in a way very much suited to this kind of historical fiction. His vocabulary is vast and occasionally esoteric enough to send readers to a dictionary—a happy digression for some. I did get a little confused with an entire epistolary segment in the book, a structural aberration, which featured letters that went from forward to backward in time. Fortunately, this doesn’t deter me in the slightest from reading The Newton Letter, the final book in The Revolutions Trilogy.

Things sure were tough around 1600. You were lucky if you got up in the morning and even luckier if you made it to bed that night without dying of a fever.

This novel won me over! In the beginning it was pretty damn moany and the language was a bit flowery but eventually the story got hold of me and I enjoyed it plenty.

I have enormous respect for the amount of research that goes into a historical novel like this. It shows a commitment to the task that's not apparent in writing a novel about, say, being a young white male working in a office somewhere getting to grips with your young white maleness.

I liked the science bits. What struck me about Kepler's work was the never-flagging optimism (from an eternal pessimist) that if he were to pull back the curtain just a little more, that the human mind would finally slot into the physical universe with geometric precision. This is something we still believe is just around the corner. Scientists have always believed it is just around the corner.

John Banville ha circulado ya en un par de ocasiones por aquí: bajo el seudónimo de Benjamin Black con el thriller “Muerte en verano” y con la novela “La guitarra azul”; del primero no encontré grandes aciertos, mientras que la segunda contenía varios elementos que la volvían rescatable. Ahora llegó a mis manos “Kepler”, una novela histórica sobre aquel matemático y astrónomo que revolucionó el pensamiento del siglo XVI, y servirá para desempatar.
Obviamente, la trama de la novela se puede encontrar en Wikipedia; lo verdaderamente interesante del libro son los recursos estilísticos con que Banville recrea un personaje lleno de contradicciones, dudas, a ratos timorato y en otros momentos majestuosamente contestatario e irreverente: el narrador cede la voz al protagonista usando el recurso epistolar (y que resuelve de manera interesante, pues las cartas que aparecen en el cuarto capítulo del libro llevan un orden cronológico inverso: vamos descubriendo mientras viajamos al pasado de Johannes Kepler); en otros momentos, hace un puntilloso develamiento de la psicología de los distintos personajes. Como señala Janice Elliot, “Banville logra transmitir con extraordinaria fuerza la vida y los tiempos de Kepler”, una época a medio camino entre los descubrimientos científicos y los atrasos tiránicos y belicosos de órdenes religiosas y de monarcas.
Así que, en resumidas cuentas: ¿es una obra maestra? No. ¿Es mejor que los mamotretos históricos tipo Ildefonso Falcones o Noah Gordon? Absolutamente. La prosa de Banville es sobria, mesurada y, por momentos, hasta sublime. Ah, por cierto, esta novela (ganadora del Premio Guardian) es la tercera de una trilogía histórica de este prolífico autor, iniciada con “Copérnico” y finalizada con “La carta de Newton”; habrá que conseguirlas. Al final, son mucho más entretenidas que acudir a la Wikipedia.

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.

Banville is an excellent writer, and he has done an excellent job in recreating Bohemia at the opening of the seventeenth century. Rich, evocative and colourful.

Che poi sembra banale dirlo. A scoprire leggi fisiche universali son uomini con la colite, il conto in banca che scarseggia, una mamma oppressiva, una moglie acida, figli irriconoscenti. E questa non sembra una di quelle imperdibili intuizioni su cui costruire chissà che cosa. Ma Banville ci si applica di buzzo buono, da grande artigiano, e costruisce un Seicento popolato di alto e basso, descritto in maniera accurata e ricca. Seicento in cui si mouve un uomo il cui sogno di scoprire le leggi segrete dell'Universo non è una rincorsa esistenziale ma una rogna che non si può fare a meno di grattare, trovando nelle notti di studio l'antidoto alle meschinerie del mondo, pur sapendo che per via dell'invidia, del malanimo, delle sgarberie il mondo arriva comunque, ovunque.
In questa rincorsa di un periodo tranquillo, di studio, di quell'angolo di paradiso che anche oggi, tutti, sembrano disperatamente cercare di ritagliarsi, Keplero vede sfuggire la sua vita e i suoi talenti, senza neanche accorgersi delle sue straordinarie scoperte, senza neanche un briciolo di coscienza dell'essersi procurata una meritata posterità.
Grande prova di "artigianato" di Banville (forse un pizzico di cuore in più...)

Alla decima febbre di Keplero, borioso eppure sconfitto, lamentoso eppure cinico con la moglie, insomma insopportabile, ho lasciato il colpo. A me decisamente non è piaciuto.

Sometimes being the smartest person in the room doesn't necessarily help when nobody knows what the heck you're talking about. And the ones who do all assume it's magic anyway.

The 1600s were not the best time for the world of science. They weren't awful, as people were starting to realizing that invisible elves with weights weren't actually responsible for gravity but it was still kind of an uphill battle. Progress was being made by various learned men, men who were looking toward the sky and the land and trying to find not only the reasons for how matters in nature acted the way they did, but why, because having some inking of the why might get you that much closer to knowing the mind of God.

Of course, the problem with this was anyone who might care was either working themselves ragged until plague or the death at the ripe old age of forty took them, or they were in charge and were more concerned with taking over territory or making political alliances. Coming along and stating that you could predict the motions of the planets and stars would either be met with a "Will it help me farm faster?" or "Will it help me make war better?" Not really the most resounding of reactions.

Hence, Johannes Kepler's dilemma. Struggling to understand the very nature of the planets via the magic of mathematics, he's not met with a lot of compassion, either treated jealously by other scientists who want the glory even if they don't fully understand the implications, or as some kind of wondrous toy by the emperor, kept around for the novelty. This is the world that Banville recreates, in what is a nominal sequel to his previous work of historical fiction "Copernicus" (it takes place maybe fifty years after that novel, at least to start). Unlike that work, Kepler isn't set to rock the very foundations of everyone's worldview by proclaiming that we aren't the center of everything, his most radical notion appears to be that the very engines that runs the universe are based on math but since everyone else pretty much believes that alchemy is real it's not like he's gaining a lot of traction. Remember those times when your calculus professor would drone on about some abstract point and the class would just glaze over? Imagine everyone in the world doing that every time you opened your mouth and you can understand why Kepler may be a bit on the prickly side.

The focus this time out seems to be more on Kepler and his homelife and inner travails, depicting him as a man with a slight anger management problem and a streak of passive-aggressiveness (his comments in letters about how Galileo hasn't commented on his work but doesn't really have to but it would be nice if he did the rotten son of a gun have their own dry hilarity), but at the same time you can understand his frustrations. He's a man with a revelation about what science can unlock in terms of knowledge, and being driven to that end all he finds are people throwing roadblocks in his path for silly reasons, for politics, for religion (as a Lutheran, to say he's not super-embraced is perhaps understating slightly although he seeks to know God as much as anyone else in that time), for domestic reasons (forced into marriage, he and his wife get along as well as any two people forced together would, although they have lots of kids, most of whom perish since nobody has discovered hygiene yet) to the point where he wants to beat his head against the wall and scream. But even with that he would find himself calculating the arc of his smashing his head into a hard surface, and seeing what that would tell him about the mysteries of the universe.

In the last novel Copernicus was widely disliked as a person and as such the novel sometimes made you wish he would be a supporting character in his own story. Kepler, while sometimes teeth-grindingly blunt and tactless in his zeal for the wonders of science, is much easier to stomach as the lead character and as such the side-plots and supporting characters seem toned down somewhat. His mother may be the wackiest person here, but she rarely appears (and gets one good scene where she stares down torture). Meanwhile even people who should be larger than life (Tycho Brahe, Emperor Rudolf) seem to recede in a sense in relation to Kepler, as the focus tends to stay on his endless quest for the heart of mathematics, and his desire not to smack the people who gets in the way of it.

With that said, it means a more even experience than "Copernicus", and in some ways more immersive. The world is far from the one we know but still becoming something that we might recognize as modern, but Banville has the trick of writing about the 17th century in its native tongue without making it seem like a costume drama or some kind of affectation. It's all filtered through the sensibilities of those who existed at that time, without being completely alien to us. And if that doesn't seem like a neat trick, try writing a story about the Thirty Years' War without seeming stilted or anachronistic. He throws out all the tricks he can to keep it interesting, flashbacks, letters, the occasional odd dreams, but mostly it benefits from being short (I don't know if this could have been sustained as a six hundred page epic, even if the material supported that length). It doesn't quite have that seductive undercurrent that pulls you into his best novels, but his prose is a finely oiled machine as always, finding new ways to describe the mundane in a fashion that makes it seem new and mundane at the same time. By giving us Kepler, he brings a world to life in the manner of the best historical fiction, by brushing off the dust, and in an even defter feat may manage to do the one thing that a whole army of math teachers may not have been able to do for you: make you see why it matters, for starting to understand how it works puts you on the path to seeing how it all fits together, and how we fit into the elegance of its motions.

Well researched and well written biography of Kepler by Mr. Banville.