Last night I finished reading this “literary mystery” by Harvard graduate and Dante scholar Matthew Pearl. Coincidentally, today while I was driving my taxi-van, I heard an interview on NPR with Matthew Pearl. The interview dealt mostly with Pearl’s most recently published book, The Poe Shadow, but it was interesting to hear him speak about his writing just after having read one of his books. And the interviewer called Pearl “the inventor of the literary mystery.” Inventor? What about the author, the name escapes me, of the mystery series featuring Jane Austen as a detective? What about Poe himself? I don’t think Mr. Pearl can lay claim to having invented the genre, but he did write a halfway decent example of it.

I only give it halfway good marks because of two flaws, both of which may have more to do with personal taste than literary merit. First of all, the book is much too nasty and gory for me; I prefer my murders Agatha Christie-style, a neat bonk on the head or a bit of poison, off-stage preferably. The Dante Club murderer is, well to put it mildly, rather fond of Dante’s Inferno, to the point that he attempts to copy Dante’s style and methods in subjecting his victims, literally and literarily, to the tortures of hell. IF you think Dante’s Inferno is violent and bloodthirsty, wait until you read about the victims of Dante’s nefarious punishments in plain prose. So, I could have skipped the maggots and the burnt flesh.

The other flaw is harder to write about. The main characters in the novel are poets and Bostonians, Oliver Wendell Homes, Sr., James Russell Lowell, and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. (Did all authors back in the 1800’s have three names?) The three, along with publisher J.T. Fields and historian George Washington Greene, are members of the Dante Club, a group of men who are dedicated to helping Longfellow produce an American translation of Dante’s three-part Divine Comedy. Apparently, from the historical note at the end of the book, up to this point we’re still in the realm of fact. Longfellow did, in fact, translate Dante into English with the help of the friends he recruited to help him. Or maybe they volunteered. As portrayed in the book, the men are obsessed with Dante. They live and breathe Dante. They have most of Dante’s poetry memorized, in Italian and in their own English translation. They believe that an American translation of Dante will just about save the world and put all things to right, if they can just get this unknown murderer to stop copying Dante’s literary tortures in real life so that they can actually get back to the job of translating and finish it up.

I’m willing, for the sake of discussion, to suspend disbelief while reading, but after I finished the book, I just couldn’t keep it up. Could anyone, even artistic types who arguably have a screw loose somewhere, have quite this much faith in Dante? One of the club members even preaches sermons using, not the Bible, but rather Dante as text and illustration. Dante, in this book, becomes Holy Writ. I just can’t believe it, but on the other hand, it makes a pretty good story.

So, basic plot: Some famous scholarly types are working on a translation of the Most Important Book Ever Written. Some other guys are trying to discourage them and keep the translation from ever being published because they believe it will have a bad effect on the masses who read it. In the meantime, someone starts murdering people using particularly foul and revolting methods that are gleaned from the pages of a translation that is yet to be published. The famous scholarly types must stop the murders, both for the sake of the intended victims and for the sake of their sacred translation.

Read it if you have a strong stomach, a strong interest in Dante, and/or a high tolerance for unlikely fictional occurences mixed with lots of literary commentary. Actually, the literary commentary personal application of Dante, from the point of view of Lowell, Holmes, and Longfellow, made up some of the best parts of the book. I’m still planning to read The Poe Shadow since no one will be inflicting Dante’s hellish tortures on anyone in that book, I assume. No pit and pendulum or hearts beating under the floor either, I hope.

Oh, by the way, The Dante Club was the first of my five R.I.P. (Readers Imbibing Peril) books.

Side note: did you know that Longfellow’s first wife died of complications following childbirth, and his second wife died on July 9, 1861, when she accidentally set her dress on fire and was fatally burned despite Longfellow’s efforts to save her which resulted in his own severe injuries? I didn’t know about that sad story. Pearl refers to this tragedy in his book which is set a few years later in 1865 or 1866. Read a brief biography of Longfellow here.