Dark Muse
01-29-2010, 12:44 AM
This is a wonderful an highly engaging book which has so much to offer and so many different levels. It is a great book for lovers of literature, history, mystery, and a must read for anyone who loves Dante and The Inferno.
It offers a mix of suspense with humor while taking the reader into the world of Boston shortly after the execution of President Lincoln and the end of the war. In a country rife with political and racial conflicts it is also a world in which many of the greater literary minds came together.
The story features around a group of famous poets of the time, Oliver Wendall Holmes, James Russell Lowell, and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, meeting every Thursday in what they refer to as "The Dante Club" in an effort to translate the great work of Dante into English to be read in America by the general populace for the first time but their are met with opposition by Harvard University, because against the Prostascint background of that time, such Catholic works were viewed as being obscene.
If that were not bad enough, a series of murders started popping up which while baffling authorities were immediately recognizable by the members of the Dante club, who say Dante's torments of hell being acted out in real life, in a way that is reminiscent of both The Name of the Rose, and the movie Seven. Brilliantly grotesque and creative.
To protect themselves who fear being the primary target of suspicion for their own knowledge of Dante, and seeking to prevent Dante's name from being tainted thus forever putting an end to their efforts for translation they seek to uncover the mystery of the murders on their own.
It offers a mix of suspense with humor while taking the reader into the world of Boston shortly after the execution of President Lincoln and the end of the war. In a country rife with political and racial conflicts it is also a world in which many of the greater literary minds came together.
The story features around a group of famous poets of the time, Oliver Wendall Holmes, James Russell Lowell, and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, meeting every Thursday in what they refer to as "The Dante Club" in an effort to translate the great work of Dante into English to be read in America by the general populace for the first time but their are met with opposition by Harvard University, because against the Prostascint background of that time, such Catholic works were viewed as being obscene.
If that were not bad enough, a series of murders started popping up which while baffling authorities were immediately recognizable by the members of the Dante club, who say Dante's torments of hell being acted out in real life, in a way that is reminiscent of both The Name of the Rose, and the movie Seven. Brilliantly grotesque and creative.
To protect themselves who fear being the primary target of suspicion for their own knowledge of Dante, and seeking to prevent Dante's name from being tainted thus forever putting an end to their efforts for translation they seek to uncover the mystery of the murders on their own.