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Quote of the Moment:
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The most important scientific revolutions all include, as their only common feature, the dethronement of human arrogance from one pedestal after another of previous convictions about our centrality in the cosmos.
— Stephen Jay Gould |
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Book Review: The Dante Club by Matthew Pearl
Posted on Saturday 24 December @ 20:05:34
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Every month (or thereabout) HGLEE.COM will review a book or film. Each work will have a brief review and a quick link to Amazon, should you decide to pick up a copy for yourself. The selection du jour: Matthew Pearl's The Dante Club.
A superb literary mystery worthy of the genre...There are few things more enjoyable than a well written literary mystery, which is precisely what Matthew Pearl provides us in The Dante Club. In Pearl's debut work, we are treated to perhaps the unlikeliest detectives in post-Civil War Boston: Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Oliver Wendell Holmes, and James Russell Lowell. These poets, along with the help of other leading Boston intellectuals, provide both the backdrop and the energy for this riveting mystery.
Make no mistake; this is no ordinary parlor exercise. This adventure is equal parts Umberto Eco and Sherlock Holmes, with all that is occult and sinister revealed only through sheer scholarly effort. "The Dante Club" is a coterie of these Fireside Poets as they work to complete the first American translation of Dante's Inferno.
As prominent Boston citizens are discovered fatally tortured, The Dante Club join forces with Boston detectives to unravel clues that are discovered only through the combination of cool-headed logic and a deep understanding of Dante's work. The result is an intriguing look at the motives of a disturbed serial killer that is driven to kill through a combination of post-Civil War trauma and a dimentia that only the initiated can fathom.
The ambitious premise of this book is matched by Pearl's superb sense of pace and character development. While there is much that fascinates the reader about the poets that are working to unravel clues, what amazes most is how Pearl makes the life and work of Dante Alighieri a central character in this modern mystery. This is a remarkable debut, and I look forward to reading many more from this gifted writer.
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