Abandon all hope, all ye who enter here
My senior English teacher in high school wanted to paint this phrase over the door of her classroom, but she could never decide if it should be on the inside or the outside. In her shoes, I doubt if I could either. As Joss Whedon so elegantly proved in Buffy the Vampire Slayer, high school really is hell.
Anyway, this well-known quote comes from Dante's Inferno, the tale of the author's journey through the afterlife with the poet Virgil as his guide. Dante wrote one of the most brutal depictions of Hell and its miseries to ever see publication, and he made no bones about describing the suffering of his enemies in great detail.
The Inferno is the jumping-off point for Matthew Pearl's The Dante Club, a mystery about the real-life Dante Club, a group of writers and poets who undertook the first American translation of Dante in the late 1860s. The group included Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Oliver Wendell Holmes, and James Lowell, among others. The mystery begins when a prominent judge is found murdered and covered with maggots and flies. Soon after a priest is discovered buried upside-down in a vertical grave with his feet charred to a crisp. The Dante Club quickly realizes that the murders are horrific reenactments of the punishments doled out by Dante and they spring into action to try and bring an end to a vicious murder's killing spree.
I've had my eye on this book for a while, and I'm happy to say that it didn't disappoint. Pearl's style is tough to get into at first because of his historian's devotion to preserving the tone of the era he writes about, but after 50 pages or so you don't even notice. Red herrings abound to keep the action interesting - I for one didn't figure out the whodunit but believed it when it was revealed. The historical depth and accuracy are truly astounding and are definitely a model worth emulating for historical writers everywhere. I'm very picky when it comes to anachronisms, but my critical nature found nothing of note in that regard, which is always a good thing in my opinion.
The Dante Club is a fine entry into the burgeoning genre of literary mysteries and Pearl definitely deserves to take his place amongst Umberto Eco, Arturo Perez-Reverte, and Iain Pears as a leading light in the category.
Anyway, this well-known quote comes from Dante's Inferno, the tale of the author's journey through the afterlife with the poet Virgil as his guide. Dante wrote one of the most brutal depictions of Hell and its miseries to ever see publication, and he made no bones about describing the suffering of his enemies in great detail.
The Inferno is the jumping-off point for Matthew Pearl's The Dante Club, a mystery about the real-life Dante Club, a group of writers and poets who undertook the first American translation of Dante in the late 1860s. The group included Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Oliver Wendell Holmes, and James Lowell, among others. The mystery begins when a prominent judge is found murdered and covered with maggots and flies. Soon after a priest is discovered buried upside-down in a vertical grave with his feet charred to a crisp. The Dante Club quickly realizes that the murders are horrific reenactments of the punishments doled out by Dante and they spring into action to try and bring an end to a vicious murder's killing spree.
I've had my eye on this book for a while, and I'm happy to say that it didn't disappoint. Pearl's style is tough to get into at first because of his historian's devotion to preserving the tone of the era he writes about, but after 50 pages or so you don't even notice. Red herrings abound to keep the action interesting - I for one didn't figure out the whodunit but believed it when it was revealed. The historical depth and accuracy are truly astounding and are definitely a model worth emulating for historical writers everywhere. I'm very picky when it comes to anachronisms, but my critical nature found nothing of note in that regard, which is always a good thing in my opinion.
The Dante Club is a fine entry into the burgeoning genre of literary mysteries and Pearl definitely deserves to take his place amongst Umberto Eco, Arturo Perez-Reverte, and Iain Pears as a leading light in the category.
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home