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'A nearly perfectly fashioned work of art ...The Newton Letter gave this reader such pleasurable excitement that he found it impossible to concentrate on anything until he had read it again to make sure that it seemed as good on the seconding reading. It did' Irish Times A historian, on the brink of completing a book on Isaac Newton, rents a cottage in southern Ireland for the summer. As the summer wears on and he dissects Newton's mental collapse of 1693 he becomes distracted by the mysterious occupants of Fern House and finds himself constructing their imagined histories to powerful effect. His elaborate attempts to decipher the complex web of relationships are, however, far from accurate ...'How is one to convey half-adequately that Banville's The Newton Letter is something out of the ordinary?' Sunday Times 'Banville's prose has a dazzling amplitude and resource ...a novelist of international calibre' Boston Globe 'Very precise and evocative ...full of teasing alignments and variations' Financial Times Volume Three of the Revolutions Trilogy
This short but powerful novel, published in 1982, is narrated by a biographer of Isaac Newton who has rented a lodge in the Irish coutryside to enable him to complete his book. As he investigates Newton's mental collapse in 1693, he becomes increasignly obssessed by the occupants of the big house - a married couple, their orphaned niece and a small child. As the biographer's affair with the niece progresses, he discovers that his glib assumptions about the family are totally mistaken. Like Newton on the seashore, he realizes 'the great ocean of truth that lay all undiscovered before me', and he too has a mental breakdown. Dermot Healy, whose books include Sudden Times, describes how he too the book up, 'expecting a stylised and compulsive foray into the world of those persons who believe in the beauty of mathematical concepts but I didn't realize I was being fooled. Banville leads you down the garden path. And in the telling he never drops a stitch. He can even laugh at his own style without you knowing. You could call it a scientific thriller, but what it is in fact about is the power of illusion, and how illusion can betray. This book is a gem.' (Kirkus UK)
ISBN: 9780330372350
ISBN-10: 0330372351
Audience:
General
Format:
Paperback
Language:
English
Number Of Pages: 112
Published: 11th June 1999
Dimensions (cm): 19.7 x 13.0
x 0.8
Weight (kg): 0.08
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