Sublunar

by Harald Voetmann, Johanne Sorgenfri Ottosen (Translator)

Overview

In the sixteenth century, on the island of Uranienborg, the pioneering Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe is undertaking an elaborate study of the night sky

A great mind and a formidable personality, Brahe is also the world’s most illustrious noseless man of his time. Told by Brahe and his assistants—a filthy cast of characters—Sublunar is both novel and almanac. Alongside sexual deviancy, spankings, ruminations on a new nose—flesh, wood, or gold?—Brahe (a choleric and capricious character) and his peculiar helpers (“I would rather watch her globes tonight than icy stars”) take painstainking measurements that will revolutionize astronomy, long before the invention of the telescope. Meanwhile the plague rages in Europe...
The second in Voetmann’s triptych of historical novels, Sublunar is as visceral, absurd, and tragic as its predecessor Awake, but with a special nocturnal glow and a lunatic-edged gaze trained on the moon and the stars.

 

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780811229784
Publisher:	New Directions Publishing Corporation
Publication date:	08/01/2023
Pages:	128
Sales rank:	524,790
Product dimensions:	5.20(w) x 7.70(h) x 0.40(d)

About the Author

Nominated for the Nordic Council Prize, the Danish author Harald Voetmann (b. 1978) has written novels, short stories, poetry, and a monograph on the Roman poet Sulpicia. He also translates classical Latin literature, notably Petronius and Juvenal. Sublunar is the second in his series of three historical novels about mankind’s will to conquer nature. New Directions published the first novel, Awake, about Pliny the Elder, in 2021; the final instalment, following eleventh-century German mystic Othlo of St. Emmeram, will publish in 2024.

Johanne Sorgenfri Ottosen is a Danish translator born in 1986. She currently lives in Copenhagen where she also works as an illustrator and literary editor.

Editorial Reviews

"Voetmann seems to work from the ground up. Although Awake and Sublunar might be called novels of ideas, Voetmann's intellectual concerns are not forcefully imposed upon fictional dramas arbitrarily designed to illustrate them, but rather arise from particulars that are irreducible. Each page of the books contains a richness of detail and a depth of attention that has all but vanished from the contemporary novel—or, for that matter, any other mass-produced object. The novels themselves—each scarcely more than a hundred pages— are miniatures that appear to have been less written than chiseled. Images glow in stark relief against the somber backdrops and recur with slight variations, as though guided by a Fibonacci sequence. Amid the guts and gore, there are moments of quiet splendour."

The New York Review of Books - Meghan O’Gieblyn

"Reading Voetmann’s books makes me feel so alive. His voice is like no other, his hold on his material masterful."

Olga Ravn

"Original, piercing, and richly exhilarating. Voetmann’s text is a sharp reminder of how powerfully and succinctly well-chosen words can create a world, render experiences, and express thoughts—in short, transport us, to places and in ways we could not have imagined."

Harper's - Claire Messud

"Voetmann’s saturnine imagery touches both ends of the optic nerve, intermingling what is seen with what is known… Marvelous."

The Baffler - Trevor Quirk

2023-05-09
This second volume in a trilogy—following Awake (2021)—is a strange assortment of impressions touching on astronomer Tycho Brahe.

The son of a Danish nobleman, Brahe gained royal funding to build an observatory on an island then known as Hven, where he also pursued alchemical projects and had a dwarf jester named Jeppe. Danish author Voetmann alludes to biographical details, but as in Awake—which concerned Pliny the Elder—the ostensible subject is often secondary. The short chapters alternate among excerpts from an assistant’s almanac of astronomical, meteorological, and personal observations; vignettes about two associates of Brahe’s—Erik Lange and Falk Gøye; letters written by the astronomer to his dead brother; and other diversions. Voetmann is a thoughtful writer whose prose at times becomes lyrical, and it’s nicely rendered by the translator. While the trilogy so far focuses on historical figures (the third book is said to deal with an obscure 11th-century German mystic), Voetmann suggests that these distant lives are elusive in fact or fiction but may be illuminated by imagining what happens in the penumbra of their achievements. The narrative’s first words, “Dark and clear commixed,” establish a motif echoed when Brahe, renowned for the accuracy of his celestial measurements, writes of Hven that “no other place on Earth has such poor visibility.” Meanwhile, daily life persists with a clarity revealing much that is odd, trivial, or grotesque. A man frozen dead mid-defecation has “excrement only halfway expelled from his bowels.” The almanac’s narrator also mentions his affair with the man who shares his bed, including Jeppe’s urging them on. Children are beaten bloody on Good Friday to commemorate Christ’s suffering. And yet, Brahe “discerned the secrets of the universe from this soup tureen of a country during the brief and rare moments when the lid was raised and heaven could be espied.”

A disjointed narrative but also arresting and memorable.

Kirkus Reviews