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Title: Rudiments of new hope
Review: An historian, on the verge of nervous and mental breakdown, is trying to complete a book on Isaac Newton in a rented cottage in Southern Ireland. The fact and circumstances of Newton's mental collapse of 1693 give him possibility to discern the vacuity of his personal psychological hellhole and urge him into interlacing of real and fictitious love affairs that lead through nothingness to rudiments of new hope and understanding.The language of the book, its pseudo-Gothic shades of mystery and psychological descriptions of the heroes are excellent. But the plot is rather weak in comparison with such masterpieces as 'Flaubert's Parrot' by Julian Barnes or 'Headlong' by Michael Frayn written in the similar manner.
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