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Summary: The Dante Club
Review: The Dante Club is a terrific novel and if I hadn't met Matthew Pearl, his father, mother, and brother when Matthew was a young child living in Sunnyside, NY (a town in Queens County of New York City), I would naturally assume that the author was an older individual with much more time on this earth to have gained the muturity to develop such a unique and entertaining novel. The blend in this novel has integrated my enjoyment of biographical historical novels and mysteries to offer a new reading experience for me. When I heard through the grapevine that Matthew had written a novel, I went straight out to buy it. The book is well worth the money spent. The book has been a pleasure to read and I have been recommending it to co-workers who have made note that is has been on the best seller list.
Rating:
Summary: The Dante Club
Review: The Dante Club is possibly the perfect novel. It has a pull-you-in plot peopled with memorable, believable characters - both historical and fictional - and is written in inventive and beautiful prose. As in A.S. Byatt's excellent 'Possession', there are opportunities to read exquisite poetry whilst engaging in a kind of treasure hunt. However, in Pearl's novel it is not treasure we are seeking but the perpetrator of some hideously - yet never gratuitously - macabre crimes. Along the way we are given access to the lives and minds of Dante himself, Longfellow, Oliver Wendell Holmes and other literary figures. Even more deliciously , 'The Dante Club' is very likely to inspire the reader to discover Dante's and Longfellow's works for himself. A good novelist writes good novels, but a great writer is also generous in his writing; he/she broadens the reader's horizons by sharing his own erudition and by gently persuading us to discover the work of other masters. Matthew Pearl manages to achieve all of this in a thoroughly engrossing debut novel.
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Summary: Fascinating subjects, but short on thrills.
Review: Matthew Pearl has managed to write an appealing historical novel that centers on the real-life members of the first Dante Club in America. The writing is historically accurate and the information you get about people like Oliver Wendell Holmes, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and James Russell Lowell, as well as 19th-century Boston, is truly fascinating. However, placing these people into a thriller and having them solve a series of murders which appear linked to Dante's Inferno seems a bit contrived. This is a plot device that seems to be used to the point of exhaustion, taking famous literary personalities from the past and turning them into detectives. Frankly, I for one have tired of it.
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Summary: Poorly constructed and difficult to follow
Review: Historical personages Dr. Oliver Wendall Holmes, James Russell Lowell, publisher J. T. Fields and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow are members of the Dante Club--an intellectual endeavor to provide the first translation of Dante's THE DIVINE COMEDY. However, people are dying in 1865 Boston. They are murdered in the most gruesome fashion. Only the members of the Dante Club realize the murders are fashioned after Hell's punishments in Dante's work. With the future of their work in danger, they must solve these brutal crimes.
THE DANTE CLUB is one of the most pretentious works put out as mainstream thriller fiction in quite some time. Matthew Pearl is a Dante scholar and he wastes not a sentence in making sure the reader is aware of that fact at the expense of plot progression. Characterization is extremely spotty and no character is truly sympathetic. This is actually a somewhat difficult book to read in that it is so poorly constructed and many times the story is difficult to follow. On the positive side, Mr. Pearl manages to portray Boston of 1865 convincingly and the premise of the book is quite original. The packaging (ie. The bookjacket) is also quite attractive.
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Summary: confusing
Review: I don't understand this book at all. I tried starting over, but by page 50, I still don't get it.
While I know who the subjects are, I'm not familiar with their history, nor do I really know the history of that time period. Perhaps if I did, this book would be easier to understand.
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Summary: Original Concept, Bad Audio Abridgement
Review: The Dante Club is one of the most original story concepts to come along in awhile. The story take place in post-Civil War Boston/Cambridge and someone is killing well-known residents using Dante's Inferno as inspiration -- very original. Boyd Gaines does a relatively good job narrating the story, giving distinct Bostonian accents to each of the characters; although, one did sound too much like Thurston Howell, III. Even with the original concept and excellent historical characters, this reading suffered from a choppy abridgement. At times it seemed like the story jumped entire chapters. If you love a good, original, historically researched mystery, then The Dante Club is a good choice, even with the bad abridgement.
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Summary: Unreadable
Review: Great reviews, interesting idea for a novel, intriquing characters. Looked forward to finally reading it. Ultimately, though, it is simply boring. Obviously a first time writer who needed a better editor. I couldn't get past page 60.
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Summary: Viciously gripping novel unable to be put down
Review: Pearl creates a portal for you to step through, if you dare. You'll end up in a post-Civil War Boston that reeks of history, erudition, and fantasy, where you will sup with a menagerie of characters (both famous, from Longfellow to Holmes, and refreshingly original, in Patrolman Rey and young Dan Teal) that will lead you through a tightly plotted-out story and discover crimes horrible enough to pay homage to Dante while remaining scarily possible.This is a novel that deserves all the clichés of each new writer that arrives: from "refreshing the mind of a now cynical reader" to "swooping in with a completely original twist" and from "weaving a web of intrigue through strong writing and research" to "a true phenomenon, one that will live on through the ages." There is no book more deserving of a good, willing reader.
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Summary: Exciting Story...Dull Storytelling
Review: "The Dante Club" is a maddening near-hit (or is it near-miss?) of a mystery. The plot is ingenious, the denouement truly a surprise, but the writing is so heavy, so lifeless that the whole thing never takes off. The book was intended to be in the class of "The Alienist," but Pearl isn't a skilled enough storyteller to come close to matching that book's excitement and energy. Too bad, because the story itself is clever and well thought out, and I was kept guessing whodunit until the very end. If only Pearl were as facile with words as his literary heroes.
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Summary: Fratricidal struggles and poets
Review: Forty-six years ago, I went with perhaps three hundred other undergraduates three times a week to my Humanities I lecture to hear Professor Eliot expound to on one of what he considered the most important examples of "The Epic and the Novel." Among these were The Iliad, The Odyssey, The Aenead, La Divina Commedia, Paradise Lost, War and Peace, and The Red and the Black. Other than a number of Trojan images that still come to mind, I don't believe I learned much from Professor Eliot except to enjoy his mellifuous eloquence and amazing erudition. I remember trying desperately to imagine why anyone would choose to read Dante. Then my daughter took up the study of Italian, and to help her memorize the first few lines of Dante's opening canto we recited them together on a road trip to Florida. I still didn't know why anyone would choose to read a catalogue of sins and sinners and horrors visited upon them in the Inferno, but I did enjoy the music of his words and admire his ability to describe so eloquently a common experience:
Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita
mi ritrovai per una selva oscura
ché la diritta via era smarrita. Midway upon the journey of our life
I found myself within a forest dark,
For the straightforward pathway had been lost.
--Longfellow translation Why couldn't Matthew Pearl have been born early enough for me to have read his Dante Club--in which his characters work on a translation in the aftermath of the American Civil War--fifty years ago? I know, I know, the diagnosis "post-traumatic stress disorder" hadn't even been invented then, and we hadn't yet entered the national trauma of Viet Nam, so he would have written a completely different book, and I wouldn't have had the intellectual tools to understand it even if it had been the same. So I can only be grateful that my eye fell on it when I was at the town caucus at the library last month. It's not an inspiring book, but it does make Dante, who was writing in the wake of another terrible fraternal war (that of the Florentine Guelfs (themselves divided) and Ghibellines), more accessible. It also comes at a time when we seem to be involved in yet another internal struggle between irreconcilable factions. The principal characters--Longfellow, Holmes (pere et fils), Lowell, Fields, Emerson, and Fields, all well-known historical characters--are beautifully and sympathetically drawn, as are the communities of Boston and Harvard. The villains and victims in a series of horrific murders skillfully attached to the Inferno are plausible and obviously the results of excellent research as well as an interesting imagination. This is a good choice for the unsqueamish, the history buff, and/or just the reader in search of entertainment.
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