The Dante Club: A Novel
by Matthew Pearl
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Book Summary Information
Author: Matthew PearlEdition: Mass Market Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2006-06-27
ISBN: 034549038X
Number of pages: 464
Publisher: Ballantine Books
Book Reviews of The Dante Club: A Novel
Book Review: Efficiently written and occasionally exciting thriller
Summary: 3 Stars
This novel is based upon historical fact. In 1867 the poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow published the first-ever American translation of Dante's "Divine Comedy". In preparing his translation he had the assistance of his fellow-poets Oliver Wendell Holmes and James Russell Lowell, his publisher James T Fields and the historian George Washington Greene. This endeavour does not appear to have met with universal approval. Although earlier British translations were available, Dante's poem was not well-known in mid-nineteenth century America, where Italian was not widely spoken. (The great influx of Italian-American immigrants was not to take place until later in the century). In Britain, Dante's criticisms of the Papacy meant that he was sometimes regarded as a proto-Protestant, but in an America whose religious life was still dominated by Puritan ideology the "Divine Comedy" was widely regarded, especially by those who had not read it, as a pernicious work of Papist superstition.
The book is a historical crime mystery set in Boston and Cambridge, Massachusetts, during the autumn and winter of 1865, a few months after the end of the American Civil War. A number of the city's most prominent citizens- a judge, a clergyman, a businessman- are found murdered in horrific and bizarre ways. With one exception, the police investigating the crimes do not realise the significance of the killer's methods. Longfellow and his friends, however, realise that all the killings parallel the punishments meted out to sinners in Dante's "Inferno". To their horror they begin to suspect that the person responsible is committing these crimes in an attempt to blacken Dante's reputation and thus sabotage their translation. Worse still, the Dante connection means that they themselves might be suspected of the killings. Together with Nicholas Rey, Boston's first black policeman and the only man outside their circle to realise the connection between the murders and Dante, they try to track down the killer. There is, however, no shortage of suspects. Many of Boston's intellectual elite, especially the powerful Corporation which controls Harvard University, are vehemently opposed to the idea of a Dante translation being published in their city.
Perhaps my main criticism would be that also made by another reviewer, namely that the book does not really convey a sense of time and place. Although the intellectual background is set out well, we do not really get much sense that we are in nineteenth-century Boston rather than, say, nineteenth-century London or twentieth-century Boston. The one part of the book where Matthew Pearl's writing does really come to life is in the vivid passages describing one character's experiences in the Civil War. The characterisation is also well done, with each of the three poets emerging as a character in his own right- Holmes timid and hesitant, Lowell impulsive and Longfellow calm and rational.
I must confess that I am probably not the ideal reader for the book, which seems to have been aimed at those whose literary interests encompass not only Dante but also detective stories and nineteenth-century American poetry. While I have read the "Divine Comedy", crime fiction, historical or otherwise, is not really my favourite literary genre, and, Longfellow apart, I am not particularly familiar with the Fireside Poets, who are much less widely known in Britain than in America. (I now realise that I had in fact conflated Holmes with his son Oliver Wendell Holmes junior, the distinguished Supreme Court Justice). I did, however, find "The Dante Club" an efficiently-written and at times exciting thriller, one that had me turning the pages as quickly as I could to find out the identity of the killer.
Summary of The Dante Club: A Novel
The New York Times BestsellerBoston, 1865. A series of murders, all of them inspired by scenes in Dante?s Inferno. Only an elite group of America?s first Dante scholars?Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Oliver Wendell Holmes, James Russell Lowell, and J. T. Fields?can solve the mystery. With the police baffled, more lives endangered, and Dante?s literary future at stake, the Dante Club must shed its sheltered literary existence and find the killer.
From the Trade Paperback edition.
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