Synopses & Reviews
Synopsis
Beguiled by the figure of German physicist Werner Heisenberg, who disrupted the assumptions of quantum mechanics with his notorious Uncertainty Principle, earning him the Nobel Prize in physics in 1932, a young, disenchanted philosopher attempts to right his own intellectual and emotional course and take the measure of the evil at work in the contemporary world.
In this critically acclaimed novel, Jerome Ferrari takes stock of European culture's failings during the 20th century and inserts their implications into a compelling vision of the contemporary world. His story is one of eternal returns, of a perpetual fall of Icarus the inevitably compromised meeting between a man's soul and the mysterious beauty of the world."
Synopsis
A challenging read that encourages reflection, The Principle examines a world inching closer to it's own destruction.
Overpopulation, nuclear war, fascism, contemporary capitalism, and climate crisis all play roles in this epistolary novel in which a young philosopher grapples with the life of Werner Heisenberg, the Nobel Prize-winning German physicist.
As he examines the dark historical events of the early 20th century alongside the luminous elegance of Heisenberg's theoretical work, the narrator provides an intimate account of his own youthful struggles and desperate attempts to make sense of a fractured, globalized world. How could a man with such a beautiful mind have participated in such atrocities? Jerome Ferrari offers a compelling, unflinching vision of the failings of European culture.
The Principle is a hypnotic glimpse into the mysteries of the physical world and a deeply personal historical interrogation that will remind readers of Laurent Binet's HHhH and Michael Frayn's Tony Award-winning play Copenhagen.