inferno – Pleasant Nights

Title: The Dante Club

Author: Matthew Pearl

Genre: historical fiction

PopSugar Reading Challenge prompt: A DNF book from your TBR list

Whew. Well, this one was a DNF for a reason. My goodness, it was just so boring. Sadly, it’s the exact kind of book I’d want to read. I used to teach Inferno. I love reading it. I love teaching it. My students and I had so much fun laughing at Dante’s creative punishments. For example, those who were false flatterers are surrounded by excrement. Those full of shit are then surrounded by it for eternity. It’s also hilarious that Dante put his neighbors that angered him into hell. The Dante Club is also about trying to solve murders that are occurring around Boston. Dante? check! Murders? check. But, gah…. just so dull.

From Goodreads: In 1865 Boston, the literary geniuses of the Dante Club—poets and Harvard professors Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes, and James Russell Lowell, along with publisher J. T. Fields—are finishing America’s first translation of The Divine Comedy and preparing to unveil Dante’s remarkable visions to the New World. The powerful Boston Brahmins at Harvard College are fighting to keep Dante in obscurity, believing that the infiltration of foreign superstitions into American minds will prove as corrupting as the immigrants arriving at Boston Harbor.

The members of the Dante Club fight to keep a sacred literary cause alive, but their plans fall apart when a series of murders erupts through Boston and Cambridge. Only this small group of scholars realizes that the gruesome killings are modeled on the descriptions of Hell’s punishments from Dante’s Inferno. With the lives of the Boston elite and Dante’s literary future in America at stake, the Dante Club members must find the killer before the authorities discover their secret.

Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes and an outcast police officer named Nicholas Rey, the first black member of the Boston police department, must place their careers on the line to end the terror. Together, they discover that the source of the murders lies closer to home than they ever could have imagined.

The Dante Club is a magnificent blend of fact and fiction, a brilliantly realized paean to Dante’s continued grip on our imagination, and a captivating thriller that will surprise readers from beginning to end.

The concept of this book is the best thing about it. But the delivery is so badly done. The way the Black officer was referred to in the book by a white author bristled me. The style of writing was so much exposition, not enough action. The author clearly needs a lesson show, don’t tell. I really wanted to like this book, but I just didn’t care at all while reading it. With thirty pages left, I could have put the book down, walked away, and had been just fine. That’s a sign of a bummer book. Oh well.

The Ninth Circle

I have read and taught Dante’s Inferno several times. I’ve dug deep into the story, the language, and the history behind it. So when I stumble across a variation of the story, I will make a point to read it. I got The Ninth Circle for free on the kindle a few years ago, and the Kindle lottery system I use put this one as my next read. It took me only a few hours to read it, but I can’t say I recommend it.

The story follows Dan as he runs away from home to join the circus. I don’t mind coming-of-age stories, but I really couldn’t relate to Dan. I didn’t like him as a person. And most of the circus people weren’t fleshed out enough. They were thinly written, and I didn’t really care about most of them. Some had sad backstories, but as Dan travels through the circles of Hell (more on that later) we didn’t spend enough time with the characters to really connect with them. By the time I was nearing the end, I realized that I could have not finished and been just fine never knowing what happened. I just wasn’t into the book.

And although this is connected to Inferno, it really isn’t as well tied as I had hoped. Yes, Dan travels through circles, as indicated by the chapter titles, and in each circle we meet a new circus performer who is in his or her own version of hell. But even without this link to Inferno, the story would have been just as thin. The author, Brendan Deneen, is known for his comic books, and I have actually read a few of them and really enjoyed them, but this book just wasn’t for me.