The Dante Club

October 7, 2002
A starred or boxed review indicates a book of outstanding quality. A review with a blue-tinted title indicates a book of exceptional importance that hasn't received a starred or boxed review. THE DANTE CLUB Matthew Pearl. Random, $24.95 (382p) ISBN 0-375-50529-6 Talk about high concept: in Pearl's debut novel, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Oliver Wendell Holmes and James Russell Lowell team up with 19th-century publisher J.T. Fields to catch a serial killer in post–Civil War Boston. It's the fall of 1865, and Harvard University, the cradle of Bostonian intellectual life, is overrun by sanctimonious scholars who turn up their noses at European literature, confining their study to Greek and Latin. Longfellow and his iconoclastic crew decide to produce the first major American translation of Dante Alighieri's Divine Comedy. Their ambitious plans are put on hold when they realize that a murderer terrorizing Boston is recreating some of the most vivid scenes of chthonic torment in Dante's Inferno. Since knowledge of the epic is limited to rarefied circles in 19th-century America, the "Dante Club" decides the best way to clear their own names is to match wits with the killer. The resulting chase takes them through the corridors of Harvard, the grimy docks of Boston Harbor and the subterranean labyrinths of the metropolis. It also gives Pearl an excellent opportunity to demonstrate that he's done his history homework. The detective story is well plotted, and Pearl's recreation of the contentious world of mid-19th–century academia is engrossing, even though some of its more ambitious elements—like an examination of intellectual hypocrisy and insularity in the Ivy League—are somewhat clunky. There are, as well, some awkward attempts to replicate 19th-century prose ("But for Holmes the triumph of the club was its union of interests of that group of friends whom he felt most fortunate to have"). Still, this is an ambitious and often entertaining thriller that may remind readers of Caleb Carr. (Feb. 11, 2003)Forecast:Pearl, yet another multitasking law school student, is 26 years old—his precociousness may spark interview interest, particularly in the Boston area.

October 1, 2002
In 1865 Boston, the efforts of literati like Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and James Russell Lowell to present the first translation of Dante's Divine Comedy are roundly resistedDuntil police need their expertise to solve a series of murders imitating the tortures in the "Inferno." First novelist Pearl knows his stuff, having won the Dante Prize from the Dante Society of America for his scholarly efforts.

Copyright 2002 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from November 15, 2002
Pearl's gripping debut novel, set in Boston in 1865, begins with the discovery of the maggot-ridden, dead body of Judge Artemus Healey. The murder shocks the city, and the police are horrified by the possibility that Healey may have been alive for the four days during which the maggots consumed his body. The next murder is equally as disturbing: Reverend Elisha Talbot is found in the underground passages beneath the church, having been buried alive with his feet burned off. The members of the Dante Club--publisher J. T. Fields, essayist Oliver Wendell Holmes, and poets James Russell Lowell and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow--have been laboring on translating and discussing Dante's " Divine "Comedy and quickly recognize the gruesome murders from the pages of Dante's " Inferno." Knowing that only a limited number of people are familiar with Dante's work, the members of the Dante Club conduct their own investigation into the killings. They zero in on a disgruntled Italian academic living in Boston, but the killer, whom they refer to as Lucifer, may be even closer than they suspect. Expertly weaving period detail, historical fact (the Dante Club did indeed exist), complex character studies, and nail-biting suspense, Pearl has written a unique and utterly absorbing tale.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2002, American Library Association.)