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The Dante Club

The Dante Club
by Matthew Pearl
Hardcover: Feb 2003,
384 pages.
Paperback: Feb 2004,
400 pages.

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First book/First Novel


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Rated 1 of 5 of 5 by Robert Adam
So bad it made me cross. I came to the novel knowing very little about Dante's Divine Comedy and finished it having learned very little more. The author who from the glowing testimonies on the jacket is clearly a very gifted academic, has no real gift for fiction. The characters in the novel are entirely one dimensional. The narrative is delivered in mock Victorian. I can understand why the dialogue might be rendered this way but the narrative style merely becomes irritating. Some of the descriptive imagery is snort inducingly bad; for example when one of the characters is pulled out of a frozen lake he alledgedly flaps on the ice like a fish!!! Overall I couldn't have cared less who the killer was which is never a good sign in a whodunnit. The only saving grace is that Dante is clearly the authors thing and he has therefore clearly shot his bolt.

Review (not rated) by Davina - BookBrowse.com
Although the author say's it isn't necessary to have read Dante's Inferno in order to appreciate 'The Dante Club' he does encourage you to do so. If you can't find a copy on your bookshelf, visit http://digital.library.upenn.edu/webbin/gutbook/lookup?num=1001 - which is part of Project Gutenberg - to read a complete reproduction of the Longfellow translation of 'The Divine Comedy' online.

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