Word: harsanyi
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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LOVER OF LIFE-Zsolf de Harsanyi-Putnam...
...novelist Harsanyi lays out this wholesome career in great detail-more, perhaps, than some laymen will care for. He loves Rubens' early years in Italy, under the patronage of the Duke of Mantua; the shrewd, rewarding sequel in Antwerp, where his studio became a factory; the courts at Paris, Madrid, London, The Hague, where, while he colored canvas by the bolt, he also did diplomatic errands in the service of his native Flanders...
Hungarian Zsolt de Harsanyi begins his story in 1587, when Galileo Galilei was 23 and threadbare, harassed by a termagant mother, a frayed father, spiteful fellow students at the University of Pisa. The well-known Leaning Tower experiment is handled by Harsanyi with considerable irony. When Galileo, then a young professor at Pisa, proved before a great crowd that objects of different weights (even though of identical shape and size) had exactly the same rate of fall, almost everyone was disappointed. "Is this all?" said the boys. But Galileo became a famous nuisance...
...attract the serious concern of the Inquisition until it began to look as if Galileo was proving it. His first brush with the Holy Office resulted in nothing more than an eloquent, friendly warning from the great theologist, Cardinal Bellarmin. It is on this occasion that Harsanyi has him make (gaily) his famous-probably apocryphal -remark: "Eppur si muove" ("Nevertheless it moves"). The heat was not really turned on until Galileo was 69, when Pope Urban VIII in a personal pet had the sick old man scared into recantation...
Most of these facts might be got more handily (and possibly more accurately) from an encyclopedia, but Harsanyi's 572-page novel provides for leisured readers a better-than-hack picture of Italy's late Renaissance cities, courts and manners. As a novelist Harsanyi has at least one artistic moment that Flaubert would have appreciated: As Galileo kisses the yellow hand of his mistress's dead father he can only think how like it is to hers...