The Newton Letter by John Banville
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

"Then comes that cold, that brave, that almost carven signature: Newton. What did he mean, what was it those commonplace things said to him, what secret did they impart? And so I sat in the shadow of lilacs, nursing an unrequitable love and reading a dead man's testament, trying to understand it.

One might say that the passage above summarizes John Banville's The Newton Letter (1982), a slim and beautifully constructed novella. Written in dazzling prose, it tells a story of a writer who has worked seven years on a book about Isaac Newton and seems to be unable to finish the work. He struggles to understand what happened to Newton who apparently suffered some kind of nervous breakdown in 1693 and wrote a strange letter to the philosopher John Locke in which he threatens to quit his scholarly pursuits:

"My dear Doctor, expect no more philosophy from my pen. The language in which I might be able not only to write but to think is neither Latin nor English, but a language none of whose words is known to me; a language in which commonplace things speak to me; and wherein I may one day dare have to justify myself before an unknown judge.

In the letter Newton also accuses Locke of endeavoring "to embroil [him] with woemen."

Yet in the epigraph, the narrator-writer also mentions his "nursing an unrequitable love," which introduces the other thread of the novella (to me, the more important one). The writer has rented a lodge to work on his book and there he meets two women with whom he himself becomes "embroiled." The two threads are entwined together, almost as if they were revolving about each other. The parallels between the two threads are both superficial - inability to continue the work or embroilment with women - but also much deeper, reaching to the core of the human behavior: why do we do what we do. Why had Newton written that letter? Why does the writer sleep with one woman while he loves the other? He does not know this any more than he knows the reasons for Newton's temporary "madness." This is a similar motif as the one in The Book of Evidence, where Freddie does not know why he committed murder.

While I admire the duality and entwinement of the motifs it is the unrequited love theme that resonates with me most strongly. Maybe because of the beautiful prose:

"Love. That word. I seem to hear quotation marks around it, as if it were a title of something, a stilted sonnet, say, by a silver poet. Is it possible to love someone of whom one has so little?

(I quote another breathtaking passage after the rating.) Sex scenes are notoriously difficult to write: even greatest authors sometimes stumble and produce passages that sound ridiculous, technical, disgusting, or just plain vulgar. Mr. Banville offers a beautifully written, delicate, almost metaphorical scene of physical love between the narrator and Ottilie. I am not able to quote because the entire longish paragraph would be needed to fully convey the beauty.

I also love the author's sense of humor: amidst all these serious events the author suddenly inserts a pseudo-literary-essayistic footnote, a reference to a fictitious paper. The effect is hilarious because it is so utterly unexpected. A wonderful novella that can be read in 90 minutes yet remembered forever.

Four stars.

"I used to picture my deathbed [...] I, a wizened infant, remembering with magical clarity as the breath fails this moment in this bedroom at twilight, the breeze from the window, the sycamores, her heart beating under mine, and that bird calling in the distance from a lost, Oh utterly lost land."

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