by Kerrin Ross Monahan
“Elizabeth Brown
Preferred a book
To going on a date.
While friends went out
And danced till dawn,
She stayed up reading late.”
— The Library by Sarah Stewart
The Dante Club by Matthew Pearl is the author’s first novel — an imaginative and extremely erudite work from a Harvard summa cum laude.
It definitely helps if one is already familiar with Dante Alighieri’s The Divine Comedy, as well as being on at least nodding terms with some of Longfellow, Lowell, and Oliver Wendell Holmes’ works. Throw in a basic understanding of the Civil War horrors and its dark aftermath — post-traumatic stress syndrome, not to mention rampant unemployment and, voilà! — one is ready to go.
At the risk of being strung up from the nearest Harvard lectern, dare I suggest that this book would make one hell of a terrific movie? — shot in alternately sepia tones and the stark blue and white of a New England winter. Good lines from the very interesting and diverse cast (not only 1865 Boston’s famous literati but a potpourri of bums, cops, and “foreigners”). Ghoulish pre-CSI type of murder scenes, gloomy church crypts and tunnels, dingy rooming houses and seedy bars, formal drawing room and elegant dinner tables — it’s all there: a visual and aural feast for the critical moviegoer.
If only Hollywood had the tried and true stable of well seasoned character actors that the British film industry has always relied upon! This is no time for a cutsey blond Valley girl starlet, dumb leading men with Spicoli accents, or aggressive kick-ass types of either gender. Intelligence, intelligence, and more intelligence!
In the right hands, the moviegoer will be led through the deepest and darkest circles of Dante’s Inferno.
“Lasciate Ogne Speranza, Voi Ch’intrate.”
(“All abandon hope, ye who enter.”)
