The last novel of John Banville’s I read was Kepler last year. An historical first-person fict
The last novel of John Banville’s I read was Kepler last year. An historical first-person fiction of the great and always overshadowed astronomer. It was an enjoyable read, but I never thought too deeply about its odd timeline until I read a conversation with Banville by Ben Ehrenreich in a compendium of Believer interviews late last summer.In the course of the conversation the author mentions that the structure of the book, in both its chapter lengths and locations, was written in a gut-busting attempt to mirror Kepler’s Platonic solid model for the geometric nature of the solar system, in which the five-know planets were spaced at orbits dictated by the five platonic solids nested around the Sun (shown above). Kepler’s writing of his Mysterium Cosmographicum forms the core of the novel, and is bookended by accounts of his travels to various key locations and the personal relationships impacting on his work. The original NYT review goes some way towards explaining: He also fills in much of the rest of Kepler’s life, but he does not do so systematically, as the reader soon learns when he confronts seeming contradictions and large gaps and reversals in time. This scrambling of events serves a literary purpose; it allows Mr. Banville to depart from the techniques of the biographer and the writer of popular fictional biography. Drawing an analogy with Kepler’s cosmos, he organizes the book as a series of orbital motions by Kepler through repeated way stations - Graz, Prague, Linz and a few other places. Kepler’s motions, forward and retrograde, are bound to centers of influence, much as the motions of the planets are bound to the sun. Because obviously just writing a novel wasn’t challenging enough. It makes me wonder about the brilliance I am missing, always, everywhere. -- source link