Rating: 
Summary: The Dante Club
Review: AMAZON REVIEW - MATHEW PEARL FOR THE DANTE CLUBMatthew Pearl's recent novel, The Dante Club, combines history, suspense, and mystery in a truly unique reading experience. Famous, well known characters such as Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Dr Oliver Windell-Holmes and James Russell Lowe are intricately woven into a plot which develops around their translation of Dante's Divine Comedy. Their plant to translate this classic video work is disrupted however, when events of Dante's work begin to be mirrored by similar events in Boston. The murder of prominent citizens modeled after their translation make them suspect. These noted historical authors work closely with a black police officer, Nicholas Ray, to prove their innocence and solve the murders. The description of Boston in 1865 in the technique used by Mathew Pearl to weave the history of the civil war and racial relations into this time period is pure and genius. The vivid description of the Boston street scene at this time in history is reminiscent of Caleb Carr's description of New York City in his book the Alienist. This book is a must for any reader who enjoys historical fiction and I would strongly recommend it to them.
Rating:
Summary: Imaginative
Review: The Dante Club is a wonderfully inventive mystery in the tradition of Umberto Ecco's The Name of the Rose or Ian Pears' the Instance of the Fingerpost. Matthew Pearl's book takes place in 1865 in Boston. Pearl creates a fictional version of the members of the original Dante Club who were engaged in the first American translation of Dante's Divine Comedy. In the novel, the murderer uses the Inferno as the inspiration for committing gruesome killings modeled after the torturous punishments of Dante's hell. First a prominent judge is murdered, then a prominent minister, then a prominent businessman. Each time a body is found, the police a baffled, but the Dante Club recognizes the punishments for what they are. The original members of the Dante Club included Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (poet), Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes, whose famous son bears the same name, James Russell Lowell (poet), George W. Greene (historian), and JT Fields (publisher). Nowadays, it is hard to imagine the amount of animosity aroused by the mere idea of translating this poem. Pearl gives us insight into the politics of 19th century Harvard University as his characters wind through the mystery. The poem and its original language are considered, by some Harvard administrators and overseers, to be vulgar, corrupting, and Catholic! The heroes are the members of the Dante Club who fight this ignorance. They live inside the poem. As great poets and wordsmiths, they struggle to balance the essence of the translation with its poetry. Pearl's imagination and writing skills are strongest when he writes about these characters; he engages us; he makes us care about getting that translation done; about foiling the small minded at Harvard. Then, Pearl weaves in a fictionalized mulatto policeman, Boston's first. He writes about the corruption of both the Boston's political system and its police. With these choices he has to write about post civil war racism. He then is compelled to make heroes out of the members of the Dante Club, who all appear to have 20th century sensitivity to these issues. Once he chose to make one of the main characters black, I think had no choice. While Racism and heroism are well worth writing about, it is in this part of the tale that Pearl lacks imagination. It is only in these segments of the novel that Pearl is predictable. It is for this reason, that I lowered my Amazon.com rating from 5 to 4 stars. All in all, Pearl has written a delightful book with an intriguing concept. I recommend it.
Rating: 
Summary: Good, but not great
Review: This novel had great promise. A murder mystery involving some of the foremost men of letters in Boston. The crimes revolving on an upcoming translation of Dante's Divine Comedy by Longfellow. However there are defects. The largest problem arises from the rapid switching of narrators. There is no single narrator of the story. Instead, Pearl switches between four main, and a couple minor, characters. These rapid and disjointed changes of narrative voice are becoming more common in recent fiction. I can only surmise that authors are trying to protect for an eventual translation into a screenplay. There is no structural reason for the point of view to change as often as it does in this novel. I suspect the customer reviews with very low ratings are a direct result of the awkwardness of Pearl's narrative style. Next, Pearl attempts to convince the readers of the importance of Longfellow's translation by suggesting that Dante's work was unknown in the United States of America. This is not exactly the truth. The Rev. Henry Cary 1805 translation was fairly common, and in fact was reprinted in New York by Appleton in 1845. Rev. Cary was an Englishman, and Longfellow's translation was the first done by an American, but that doesn't mean the Rev. Cary's translation was poor or unobtainable. Having read both, I actually prefer Cary's translation. I'll grant that this is a matter of taste. Which brings me to my last point. There is almost nothing in the work to inform the reader that during the middle of the nineteeth centuary the American literati were deliberatly attempting to create an American style of English. There was an intense desire to create an American language and show the world that American authors were as good as any European authors. Maybe this point is not essential to the story, but Longfellow's translation of Dante was not strictly a personal goal. It seems strange that these last two points were only mentioned by an Italian immigrant. These quibbles aside, this is not a bad book. For a first novel it could be a lot worse. If Pearl learns from the awkwardness of his narrative style, his future books will be far more accessable to his readers.
Rating:
Summary: Well written historical novel that lacks - pizzaz
Review: The murder mystery doesn't hold it's own. I found the mystery part of the book to be predictable. You really need to be interested in both the times, post-Civil war Boston and the characters, nineteenth century, writers. The author certainly brings historical Boston and Cambridge alive, but I found the main characters to be dull. In a good novel, you really care about the outcome of the characters, and in this book, I found myself disinterested. Part of the problem is that we know that the main characters are most likely not in mortal danger, unless this novel is going to greatly deviate from well known history. The other problem is that the characters remain both stuffy and Victorian throughout the book. The major character issues are not resolved. Basically it ends on a yawn. The book might have been better with less emphasis on the authors and more on Rey, the black patrol man, who struggles both against racism and the murderer.
Another problem is that I didn't learn much about Dante. This book doesn't have to be another "Davinci Code", but theming murders on Dante's writings is less interesting than if the writers knowledge of Dante, perhaps some poetic clue, was effective in solving the mystery. One last issue is that I found the pacing slow at the beginning. It picks up about mid-way through.
I finished to book to find out "whodunit" without that issue, I might have stopped. I will say in defense of the author that the book is very well written and his historical research is top notch as well.
Rating: 
Summary: The Dante Club
Review: Mattew Pearl's recent novel, the Dante Club, combines history, suspense, and mystery in a truly unique reading experience. Famous, well known characters such as Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Dr. Oliver Windell-Holmes and James Russell Lowe are intricately woven into a plot which develops around their translation of Dante's Divine Comedy. Their work is disrupted however, when a series of murders in Boston are modeled after mankind's punishment in hell as described in Dante's Inferno. The murder of prominent citizens modeled after their translation make them suspect. These noted historical authors work closely with a black police officer, Nichola Ray, to prove their innocence and solve the murders. The vivid description of Boston in 1865 and the unique literary skill of Mattew Pearl to weave the history of the civil war and racial relations into this time period is pure genius. The words used to describe the Boston street scene at this time in history are reminiscent of Caleb Carr's description of New York City in his book the Alienist. This book is a must for any reader who enjoys historical fiction and I would strongly recommend it to them.
Rating:
Summary: Not bad, might make a good movie
Review: As I currently attend college in Boston and have read the whole of Dante's 'Divine Comedy', I intrigued by the title and the synopsis of the book. I rarely read mysteries, so I couldn't say if this was predictible for its genre. However, I think as a first attempt by an author, 'The Dante Club' can be a fairly enjoyable read for those familiar with 19th century Boston, Dante, or any of the historical figures mentioned. I agree with the assessment that the beginning is slow. I felt the first part or 'canticle' really served mostly as character building and that slowed the pace a bit. However, once the author feels he has established the murders and our heroes, the story picks up fairly quickly. Despite the character building, I couldn't help but feel I should have had some knowledge of the characters such as Oliver Wendell Holmes and Henry Longfellow prior to reading the book. I had also hoped more Dante would be included, but I think the author used the 'Comedy' well for the story's purposes. I'd like to see this made into a movie. However only with careful attention to Dante, the historical time period and figures, and the book itself, and not a typical book to movie adaption which rarely does justice to the original work.
Rating:
Summary: Slice n dice
Review: I heard the abridged audio version of this book on the way to New Orleans. I hope the disappointments I have are a result of leaving too much out and not what's actually in the complete novel. The story's OK, the detail is interesting, the mood is engaging. I just couldn't get into the thing enough to sit in my car and listen after I'd got back to the hotel. I often found I was waiting for 4:00 so I could switch to All Things Considered. But I finished it. It wasn't bad. I had two big beefs. The big one has to do with the trendy conceit of having a team of famous historical characters -- Oliver Wendell Holmes, Henry Longfellow and the like -- solving a murder. Yeah, that's what I thought, too -- I kept cringing when I would automatically think of Sherlock, then try to wrench my mind back to Oliver Wendell. And a poet going over bloody crime scenes? Kind of a conceited conceit. I just couldn't really get into the characters because of the nonsequitur-ness of the idea. The other was the choppiness of the story. Maybe it was just a sloppy job of abridgement, but there were a number of places where some meat was missing. Only a couple of key details (there are definitely worse abridgements out there), but some of the flow was ruined. It wasn't bad. If you're at Cracker Barrel, and the choice is between the same Mary Higgins Clark you listened to last trip, Dianetics, and The Dante Club, Dante is an easy pick, and it will be worth the listen. There are better ones out there, though. Quick: the first chapter of Dante's real Inferno is on the last disk. Just a teaser, but enough to really see the attraction. The reader is obviously as thrilled about it as I am, does a much more convincing job on this small bit than any of the main part of the novel. Can't wait to read it!
Rating:
Summary: Animatronic
Review: I couldn't finish this one. The Dante Club members were animatronic famous people - I couldn't tell any difference between Holmes, Lowell, and Longfellow. The black policeman hung about being noble and long-suffering. I suppose if you love Dante you'd like this book.
Rating:
Summary: "Dante" is a promise that is fulfilled
Review: Many books --mostly by young and debutant writers -- are released as a big promise. But, unfortunately, most of them are never able to fulfill it. So, it is a great pleasure to come across a book like Matthew Pearl's "The Dante Club". This novel is everything that it had promised and little bit more. At this point, the plot is widely known. In 1865, a group of Bostonian scholars is translating Dante's masterpiece. While they are dealing with "Inferno" (Hell) a murderer is executing people based on the most terrifying scenes of this poem. This not only endangers lives, but also jeopardizes the translation itself. Mixing real personalities and fictional characters, the writer creates a novel that if is not real, could have really happened. It is clear that Pearl has an eye for the macabre and it is very effective for this novel. He also makes a literary analyzes of Dante and the process of translation. Not a boring and inaccessible thing, but with his text he brings to light questions that many translators might have had --not only when it comes to Dante. The process of humanization of historical figures works more than fine. They way they behave and think are quite real, and it is almost impossible to think that those events never happened. And, as Pearl states in an interview in the book, it is not required to be familiar with Dante's work. But, I think that those who don't know the Italian poem will feel very likely to read it --at least its "Inferno". Thinking of "The Dante Club" comes to my mind another bestseller, "The Da Vinci Code". But while Dan Brown's novels lacks character development and profundity in the situations, Pearl has succeeded in creating a thriller that is bloody good, with believable characters and beautifully written. It also reminded me of Calleb Carr's "The Alienist", but, again, I think that "Dante" is much better. It is a winner.
Rating:
Summary: Probably worth about 4-and-a-half stars
Review: Historical Fiction has always been a popular choice for many readers. The "Dante Club" has rightfully earned its place as one of the best of the genre. Matthew Pearl delivers to us an impressive first novel which enlightens the City of Boston, circa 1865.
Pearl's premise for the story is outstanding. A serial killer has re-enacted various Dante styled punishments for those he felt deserved to die. It is up to America's first group of Dante scholars (Longfellow, Holmes, Lowell, and the Publisher Fields) to solve the murders without blemishing their own outstanding reputations. Pearl's novel does have a few drawbacks. The pace is somewhat uneven, and in places you find yourself skimming along. Also, the characters are not completely believable. Oliver Wendell Holmes' extraordinary ego is well documented, but Pearl paints him to be very one-dimensional and somewhat frail. We also have the great Longfellow- who was one of the two masters of his era (Along with Emerson), but Pearl reveres Longfellow to the point where he becomes almost saintly. Shy and understated but loved to an unbelieveable level. It almost seems that Pearl exaggerates each characters personality in order to fit into the framework of his story. I guess authors this isn't the greatest sin any author has committed. This may be a perfect example of a novel that makes a great read, but would not make it as a movie. The weakness of the characters can be overlooked while reading the story, but it would make for a very weak (and unbelievable) movie. So where does the story rate- well I would put it slightly ahead of "The Devil in the White City", but behind Caleb Carr's fine work ("The Alienist" and "The Angel of Darkness"). If you like historical fiction- I am sure that this will be a happy find.
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