What Makes a Story? – Cassini's Vision

The Guardian, interview with Alex Miller, Australian author of The Passage of Love—a wonderful and poignant novel set in so many of those Australian places where I too have lived.

But, back to Cassini’s Vision. The history? In renaissance Italy? In the Enlightenment? Yes, we have an “ocean of stories”.

I am hoping I have found a little of that novelist’s nous to make an enjoyable narrative, some magic, from that plethora of material.

Because the history does not make the story. The history is to give background. History facts deserve to be bent. History’s to tease. It’s to give smell and taste, maybe humour.

But it’s the story that makes the story.

The “other woman”

The GIOVANNI CASSINI of your history books was seduced from Bologna by a lucrative offer from France’s Sun King. Louis XIV made him head of his new Paris Observatory, the world’s greatest. Cassini rebranded as French, married into the aristocracy and began a long, famous and rather staid dynasty of French astronomy.

But did you know Gian Cassini had an earlier Italian wife? CELIA was a feisty young baroque artist, scarred, angry, and eager to follow in the steps of her famous grandmother. This version of Cassini’s life is a far more entertaining problematic tale.