In the Hand of Dante: A Novel

Rating:
Summary: It hurt... It really hurt!
Review: Try as I might, there was simply no getting through this horrid book! Encouraged by a promising description, I bought it in an airport, thinking it would be a good way to pass the time in my travels. I can understand instances where profanity and utter nastiness can have literary merit, though in this work they were simply egregious. It was almost as though Tosches was simply trying to be profane for sheer shock value. After suffering through a number of chapters, I left my new ... hardback on the airplane for the next poor soul who happened upon it. I would not recommend it to anyone.

Rating:
Summary: Not for everyone, including me.
Review: You know, it's telling that the response to this book has been so heated: whatever you think about the book, Tosches has tapped a nerve. I, like many others in these reviews, bought the book on the promise offered by the jacket description - the dark, labyrinthine journey of one trying to authenticate a lost manuscrpit of "The Divine Comedy", coupled with the similar journey of Dante himself struggling to complete it. But I was really disappointed: I really liked the contemporary scenes (profanity, after all, is part of our world, and if it offends you, then you shouldn't read this - although you will be missing out on some astounding invective that does have a purpose), but Tosches lost me on the Dante scenes; they are poetic, they seem appropriate in their style, but they just belaboured an already obvious point, and as the book went on, these scenes got longer, and the "Tosches" scenes got shorter. What I felt to be the more interesting part, and the part that grabbed me and made me buy the book, just fizzled away into two-page updates, if you like. What annoyed me with the Dante scenes was that they really seemed to be poetic posturing by the author - Tosches writes beautifully, but one's patience is sorely tried when four (or more) pages are taken to say something when one would suffice, all in some dense vernacular that seemed (apart from "setting" this narrative in 14th century Italy) only to break the flow of the founding narrative. If you want to read novels written in the style of a period, but with a modern perspective, read William T. Vollmann - the jump from modern to period works, and each inform the other. This is not, I'm sorry to say, the case here. Thrilling at times, nearly always beautiful in one way or another, but ultimately anticlimactic. A previous review title said it all: "A promise unfulfilled".

Rating:
Summary: Not for everyone, including me.
Review: You know, it's telling that the response to this book has been so heated: whatever you think about the book, Tosches has tapped a nerve. I, like many others in these reviews, bought the book on the promise offered by the jacket description - the dark, labyrinthine journey of one trying to authenticate a lost manuscrpit of "The Divine Comedy", coupled with the similar journey of Dante himself struggling to complete it. But I was really disappointed: I really liked the contemporary scenes (profanity, after all, is part of our world, and if it offends you, then you shouldn't read this - although you will be missing out on some astounding invective that does have a purpose), but Tosches lost me on the Dante scenes; they are poetic, they seem appropriate in their style, but they just belaboured an already obvious point, and as the book went on, these scenes got longer, and the "Tosches" scenes got shorter. What I felt to be the more interesting part, and the part that grabbed me and made me buy the book, just fizzled away into two-page updates, if you like. What annoyed me with the Dante scenes was that they really seemed to be poetic posturing by the author - Tosches writes beautifully, but one's patience is sorely tried when four (or more) pages are taken to say something when one would suffice, all in some dense vernacular that seemed (apart from "setting" this narrative in 14th century Italy) only to break the flow of the founding narrative. If you want to read novels written in the style of a period, but with a modern perspective, read William T. Vollmann - the jump from modern to period works, and each inform the other. This is not, I'm sorry to say, the case here. Thrilling at times, nearly always beautiful in one way or another, but ultimately anticlimactic. A previous review title said it all: "A promise unfulfilled".