Review: The Dante Club

[tinegunner]

The Dante Club by Matthew Pearl:

3 out of 4 stars.
I was intrigued by this book when it first came out 8 years ago, and just now finally read it. It helps that I have read Inferno before although it was over 10 years ago and don’t remember specifics but certainly have some of the eerie and nightmarish scenes imprinted in my mind forever. After reading The Dante Club, I am inspired to read Inferno again.

The plot unfolds as such: Three poets, Longfellow, Lowell and Holmes, plus their printer Fields are busy translating the Inferno into English in Boston 1865 a few months after the Civil War has ended. The Inferno has never been seen by the masses in America before. As the poets are affiliated with Harvard, and with Harvard being a religious institution, there is much controversy over the unveiling of Dante’s Comedy in Puritan America. A group of men at the Harvard Corporation are doing what they can to stop the printing. The first third of the book deals a lot with this, meanwhile, the Dante-inspired murders begin to happen. In the beginning, the investigation unfolds slowly, so the book is hard to get into the first 100 pages or so.

Eventually, members of the Dante club catch onto the clues that the murders are inspired by Dante, and thus launch their own investigation into the catching the killer. At this point the book starts to flow quite nicely and more quickly, and it was hard to put down. It was a properly constructed murder mystery, with enough false but promising leads to be interesting and creepy. The book is long and flowing, the murders are described in great and horrifying detail very vividly.

Paralleling The Club’s search for the killer, the police of course have their own investigation, which is making slower progress, but the intuition of one promising officer Rey, the first African-American patrolmen in Boston, leads them in the right direction. Eventually, due to political pressure the police investigation is stalled, and Rey joins up with the Club to aid in their search. Once the final major clue is discovered, and search intensifies, I appreciated the way Pearl ties in the events of that time period as a motive for the murders. It is somewhat unexpected, ties in nicely with Dante's time period as well, and makes a general political statement about the current events of that time - although it is an age-old problem.

Pearl’s writing style is not to be reckoned with. It very much has the old-world feeling of being written in the 19th century. He nails the dialogue and the conversation of the times as formal but without going overboard. On the other hand, he is an odd writer. He can jump from one scene to the next without a break in paragraph and without inflection in the language as to signal a change in scenery or time. This made it a slow read, as every word has to be read carefully or you can completely miss a scene. I found myself re-reading many pages because I had missed just a few words. While I appreciated the delicateness of the prose, it made for many confusing moments. In summary, at the beginning of this book, I almost hated it, by the end, quite liked it, and was thinking whether Pearl had any other books I could read.

[Skillian]

I loved this book! I read it in my Senior English class in 2006 (I had an awesome teacher). Oh man, I just remembered feeling captivated by it. Great review! It dug memories up for me, and now I'm thinking I will give it another read. And I'm also wondering why I hadn't looked up other books by the author back then. I guess I was preoccupied or something. I can't believe I let myself forget about it! So glad you did this review!

[tinegunner]

Try reading Dan Brown's Inferno as well. A lot of Dante imagery but with a completely different premise / mystery. Great Italian history and a much larger social problem which will leave you thinking about it for a long time!