SUBLUNAR

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.