Rating: 
Summary: A Wonderful Read
Review: This is a great book--and an amazingly great first book.
Matthew Pearl has brought well-known historical figures to life in a page-turning mystery.
The reader is in Boston in 1865 and totally swept along by events.I have recommended this book to all my mystery-reading friends and have been thanked by each of them.A wonderfully original idea, beautifully executed.
I look forward to Matthew Pearl's next work.
Rating:
Summary: fan from the Cambridge, Massachusetts area
Review: This week I finished reading The Dante Club, and I was blown away by it. I love Longfellow. The park rangers do a wonderful job conducting tours; it is easy to see that they have a real fondness for Longfellow. However, the author was able to take it one step further and bring the man and his circle of friends to life once again. The book is beautifully written, and I enjoyed the unusual luxury of savoring it slowly. Yes, the maggots did disgust me; but the rest of the book was such perfection that I was willing to deal with them just so I could keep reading. I really liked the personalities of the characters and the action of the story itself. It was very disappointing when I reached the end, not because of the actual ending, but because my fun was over! However, I discovered that my disappointment could be assuaged by reading it all over again! Something I don't ever remember doing before. That coupled with a willingness to share it with friends, but this time assuring them that I want my book returned to me, puts it in a very special category. Finding myself so thoroughly enthralled by the book, I would be remiss if I did not convey my admiration. Mr. Pearl deserves congratulations on a job well done!
Rating: 
Summary: well crafted but colorless and full of wrong notes
Review: I enjoyed this book, and I will probably keep an eye out for the author's next one. The mystery is clever and well-crafted, and its unfolding is entertaining enough. The resolution didn't quite convince me, however, and I was more than a little disappointed that my favorite character, Nicholas Rey, the mulatto police officer, was such a minor force in the book.Unlike some of the reviewers here, I was not dazzled by the book's depiction of 1865 Boston. The author gives us very little in the way of description. The book convinces me that the author knows the city, but it ought to have convinced me that I know it myself. As for the time period, it failed to come alive. Though we spend a lot of time with the characters' private thoughts, I never felt I'd gotten to know any of them. I never had the sense that they were real, that they had a life that extended beyond the book. There is a muted tone to the book which perhaps is meant to echo the writing style of the protagonists, but which distanced me from the material. Compounding this problem is the author's truly wretched ear for dialogue, which in the end is the book's main failing. Nearly every conversation has two or three tinny lines that jar the reader right out of the story. As for Dante: there is much lip-service paid in the book to his greatness, but we are never really made to _experience_ his greatness, as we surely would have in a work by Eco or Crowley. As mentioned by others, the book could have been much better with some judicious editing. I've had that feeling a lot lately. Do editors even exist anymore?
Rating: 
Summary: Macabre murders in Boston
Review: Matthew Pearl's 'The Dante Club' gives readers a portrait of Boston in 1865. Boston is a city in transition, in the twilight of its golden age of clipper ships and China traders and transcendentalists. Slaves have been freed and soldiers are returning home from the horror of the Civil War. The tide of immigration is rising, and Boston's 'Brahmin' elite are beginning to lose their grip on the city. In just two decades Boston will elect its first Irish-American mayor. But Boston, broadly defined, can credibly claim to be the Athens of America in 1865, and just across the river in Cambridge, a small group of eminent litterateurs led by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow is engaged in a highly controversial project ' the translation of Dante's 'Inferno.' When three of Boston's most prominent citizens are murdered, each in an exceptionally fiendish way, the police department is ill-equipped to handle the investigation. Its fledgling detective bureau is especially inept and almost melodramatically corrupt. Only one junior member of the force, a decorated war hero and the city's first African-American police officer, appears to have the intelligence and perseverance needed to crack the case, and he can't do it without the help of Longfellow's 'Dante Club.' The Dante Club is an ambitious book, combining fact with fiction and blending history, poetry, biography and mystery with a dash of the macabre. It should appeal to those with an affinity for Boston settings as well as to mystery fans and English majors. According to his Web site, Pearl is at work on another book set in the nineteenth century. Perhaps if bodies begin to turn up in Nantucket we'll find Herman Melville on the case.
Rating:
Summary: The Definition of Historical Fiction
Review: Matthew Pearl's novel is an incredible mystery that effectively utilizes the attitudes of the immediate post civil war era of New England to set the stage for his novel. Pearl has created a first rate mystery that uses accurate history for its setting. His understanding of the time period is such that I was immersed in 19th Century Boston and didn't want to come out of it. Pearl not only has effectively used history to tell his story, but he also has beatiful writing to tell the story. The story can carry itself, but the writing that Pearl combines with the story makes it a long lasting picture of what fiction ought to be like.
Rating:
Summary: The Dante Club - Astonishing
Review: Every once in a while a novel comes along and is simply stunning in every way. The last novel I was this excited about was Donna Tartt's The Secret History, and in my opinion this novel is just as good as. For those of you like me who knew nothing (and I mean nothing) about Dante, this novel offers a fascinating introduction of Dante and his work. Think of the combination, we have Dante, an insightful look into 19th Century history, a setting in smouldering Boston that you can almost smell, a killer on the loose more sadistic than any other indiviudal I have come across in print, a group of unlikely heroes using 19th century detective work, and you have a mix that is simply unbeatable. I simply could not put this book down. I read it waiting for public transport, travelling on public transport, getting off public transport, walking to and from work, and last thing at night. Give it a try, you'll have bitten every fingernail off, by the time you get to the last chapter.
Rating: 
Summary: Too Many Tangents
Review: Thoughtful plot but too drawn out and many tangent situations which induced a severe case of bordom while reading. Was hard to finish but did manage. Good scene descriptions of 1865 Boston/Cambridge/Harvard. Crimes were reminiscent of THE ALIENIST which was a better book. All in all not a bad effort for a first novel although I agree with an earlier reviewer that the editor should have done a better job.
Rating:
Summary: Slog, slog, slog
Review: Try to slog your way through this novel. This is one of those books that I put in the class of "books for people who want to learn about stuff but don't want to actually work at it." Witness the popularity of "what you can learn from proust" - how many who read that had read "A la recherche du temps perdu?" So this is an historical novel about the publication of the first translation of Dante's "Inferno" and you can learn about the history of Cambridge and toss little bits about Lowell and Holmes into your dinner conversation. The murder mystery part is to keep you slogging through the dull bits. I'm not saying this an awful book, but there is so much being published today and one can only read so much. The writer obviously put a lot of work into this; I wish his editor had as well.
Rating:
Summary: Great premise; poor execution
Review: A Harvard alumnus who is also a Dante scholar writes a thriller that involves crimes that mirror some of the horrors that take place in the Inferno. In addition, the author sets the novel in the mid 19th century and includes such luminaries of literature as Longfellow, Holmes, Lowell, and Emerson (in a cameo). Great credentials. Excellent premise. Should be a great book, right? Well, I had hoped so when I secured a copy. However, the story lags. The pacing is too slow. The editors could have eliminated 100 pages and greatly improved the book. Pearl is a first-time novelist; as a matter of fact, he claims to have written very little fiction before beginning this novel. His inexperience is evident throughout the book, as is his potential as a writer. There are moments in the novel when Pearl piques the reader's interest by creating fine details of 19th century Boston and by describing gruesome scenes. His dialogue, though, is stilted (supposedly this was done on purpose to mimic how erudite Bostonians spoke in those days). But, sometimes the plodding plot and wooden dialogue makes the reader want to turn the page and hope for something better or close the book forever. I chose to finish it. Pearl is a writer with great potential. I believe he will reach that potential only when he learns to trim the fat and pickup the tempo.
Rating:
Summary: Scooby Doo with famous Americans
Review: I found this book interesting because I was living next door to Longfellow's house at the time I read it and I am a Bostonian. So it was interesting to see what Boston was like then for these famous people. However, the plot turned from interesting to ridiculous. And then it simply felt like a Scooby Doo episode with famous American literati. Zoinks.
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