.... or not, depending on how you're feeling. For those of you who recognize the quotation, well done. It is, obviously, Dante Alighieri and this post will discuss Dante and a book that references Dante heavily, The Dante Club by Matthew Pearl. I have a sneaking suspicion that this post could be slightly disjointed since my mind is running in two directions at once, and I'm going to try to deal with both thoughts in one post. One one hand, reading The Dante Club made me think about Dante and his role in our literary canon; on the other, I have a number of thoughts about the novel itself.
First, Dante. I must confess that I have never read anything by Dante, including The Divine Comedy. I am certainly familiar with the concept behind the story, and know some famous quotations (such as the title of this post); I've even seen it performed by Theatre in the Mud. If you ever go to Theatre in the Mud, be sure to stay out of the splash zone. I wonder if that says something about me. Should I be more familiar with Dante? His is certainly one of the biggest names in world literature, and I feel somewhat less than fully cultured for not having read at least The Divine Comedy. Am I being too hard on myself? I'm familiar with Chaucer and Shakespeare, Hugo and Stendahl, but not Dante. I'm always looking for new works to share with my students, but Dante has never crossed my mind.
Is my lack of familiarity with Dante due to him writing in classical Italian? I'm not sure. I have never thought of myself as being a snob about only wanting to read English speaking authors, but that seems to be the case. My familiarity with translated works is definitely lacking. Reading The Dante Club, and the passion with which men like Longfellow and Wendell Holmes worked on translating Dante's work into English has made me want to read The Divine Comedy. Maybe that will be my summer reading.
Now, onto the novel that inspired this post. The Dante Club is a murder mystery set in 1865 Boston. It is the story of how "The Dante Club" solves the mystery of who is killing men using punishments from Dante's Inferno. The premise is really interesting. The main characters are well-known figures from literature and publishing. "The Dante Club" is made up of poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, author Oliver Wendell Holmes, historian George Washington Greene, poet James Lowell and publisher James Fields. This is historical fact. These men came together after the American Civil War to translate Dante's Divine Comedy into English. What happens as a result of this collaboration though, is purely a work of the author's imagination.
In the novel, a mysterious murderer stalks the streets of Cambridge, Mass. killing prominent men in horribly painful ways. The members of the Dante Club come to the horrific realization that the murders are being taken from Dante's travels through Hell in The Divine Comedy. As is so often the case in murder mysteries, the police are horribly incompetent, and it falls on these literary powerhouses to solve the murder. I found this to be a great idea for a novel, and I for the most part, I really enjoyed it.
As someone who is passionate about history, I loved the description of life in Boston and Cambridge in the post-Civil War era. It really struck me as realistic. Matthew Pearl really did his research when writing this novel. The differences in the university system really struck me. The idea that the Harvard Corporation would work to prevent Dante from being studied in English was just fascinating. The underlying racism and anti-Catholicism also rings very true. The fear of immigrants from Ireland and Italy was true to life. Another realistic feature was the treatment of the soldiers coming home from war, and the internal terrors they faced. All in all, it was a well done novel.
There was only one aspect of the book that I didn't particularly enjoy. The author kept hinting that there was actually an evil force at work, and that by translating Dante, the authors may have actually released evil into the world. I found this to be a stretch. Pearl had a great novel already; there is enough evil in the human characters; why hint that there was anything supernatural? I felt that it was an unnecessary complication in the book. That's only a mild criticism; overall, I enjoyed the novel and recommend it to others.
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