The Dante Club
(Matthew Pearl)
It is quite interesting to read a novel where real life characters are involved in a fictitious story. It sometimes makes those characters closer to us, as we see them as ordinary human beings with faults and virtues like anybody else. A problem though might be to correctly describe them and the facts around them so that what happens in the book could indeed feasibly have happened and maybe did happen after all..the facts are fictitious or aren?t?I enjoyed "The Dante Club", as it brought me back to my high school studies when I read Dante?s Comedy for the first time. An imaginary or maybe real incredible journey across Hell Purgatory and Paradise, where Italian Poet Dante Alighieri and his guide Virgil meet with the most incredible historical characters to whom the former assigns a definite position and, at times, punishment in the afterworld. And like the Comedy, The Dante Club takes people from real life depicting them as vivid in a breathtaking narration.Dante?s comedy was translated in the United States by great poet and linguist Henry Wadsworth Longfellow in the nineteenth century, not without obstacles. It is a poem but also a language rebellion, written in vulgar Italian instead of noble Latin or Greek, it is narrative but also politics and religion . It really may not have been easy for Longfellow to have the translation approved by literary circles and major universities.Elegant Boston is the background to the story. What a city of contradictions it must have been at the time, war veterans, immigrants, a bundle of traditions, cultures and religions in the heart of AmericaAnd that is where it all starts, in Boston, after the end of the Secession War, where Longfellows and some fellow poets and writers of his set the Dante club to translate the Comedy into English for publication. They meet regularly, while atrocious murders take place in the town. Only at some point in the book it becomes evident that the murderer is Dante Alighieri himself ?And all this while the town is filled with weird characters, therefore we struggle to imagine whodunnit as the clues leading to the solution are wittingly spread along the pages. The attentive reader will not miss them..
Resumos Relacionados
- Divine Comedy
- The Divine Comedy
- Biography Of Dante
- The Divine Comedy
- The Divine Comedy
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