The Dante Club

[lightreads]

The Dante Club by Matthew Pearl


My rating: 2 of 5 stars
Bizarrely, I think this book would have gotten a higher rating out of me if it hadn’t had the bits I really liked.

Boston, 1865. The fireside poets – Longfellow, Holmes, Lowell, and their publisher – investigate a series of murders modeled on Dante’s Inferno, which they are translating.

Eh. A quite good bit of literary historical fiction bolted to an extremely unfortunate mystery. We’d have these great, detailed scenes of the poets talking through the cantos of their translation and being all bitchy lit theory at each other in this adorably stiff affectionate way, and then, turn the page, and the mystery. Bad pacing, weird fits of tell, a fixation on gruesomeness at the expense of most other things, a lot of ridiculousness (a vagrant whispering the words carved over the doors of hell to a policeman before committing suicide? Really?).

And weirdly, if it had just been the mystery I would have shrugged at a bit of typical clumsy New York Times bestselling airport fiction. But it wasn’t, and the bits of more nuanced writing, of real grace and complexity, were ultimately more frustrating than they were enjoyable.

View all my reviews >>