The Dante Club, by Matthew Pearl

Retrieved from: the library
(0375505296), 2003
Suggested by: I'm not sure, but it was definitely a review I read

Hmmm, well, it has promise of interest written all over it: about Dante, about 19th century post-Civil War America, about crime...and yet somehow I spent most of the book wondering why I was continuing to read it.

Maybe it was the opening, in which we get to hear, in detail, about nasty red-eyed flies and maggots crawling all around a body. Which, by the way, isn't DEAD YET! Urk.

Or maybe it's the interminable slowness of the detectives: James Russell Lowell, James Field (of Ticknor & Fields, Publishers), Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes--the latter of whom is the only one for whom I took away any empathy. In fact, I've come to loathe Longfellow while being grudgingly grateful for his work on the first English translation of Dante.

Or maybe it's all the obvious red herrings strewn about the path on the way to discovering the ringer . . . er, killer.

Whatever it was, I did not enjoy reading the book. But I wanted to figure out who the killer was, this person who is murdering prominent Bostonians in the style of Dante's cirles of Hell. A clever conceit, and by the end it all ties together and makes perfect psychological sense, as anachronistic as that is. It just takes a v-e-r-y - l-o-n-g time to get there.

I did like Nicholas Rey, the mulatto police officer. He was a fabulous character, who should have had more to do in this book. It would have been wonderful to get to know him better; as it is we have a slight character sketch, no real solid backgound information and nothing about his future in the police department at the end.

For reference, it is necessary to have a pretty solid working knowledge of these subjects before reading this book:

• The aforementioned detectives, known as the Dante Club
• The literary climate of 19th-century Boston
• Dante's Inferno
• Psychology basics
• Race relations in America
• Civil War medicine

Otherwise, I guarantee you'll be lost. As I was, in several parts... A strong stomach would not come amiss, either.