In the Hand of Dante

July 22, 2002
Deftly blending the sacred and the profane, Tosches boldly casts himself as the protagonist in his latest novel, an outrageously ambitious book in which he procures a purloined version of the original manuscript of The Divine Comedy
while tracing Dante's journey as Dante struggled to complete his penultimate work. The initial chapters find Tosches looking back and questioning the results of his fascinating life and career, with a brief but devastating aside about the decline of publishing. But Tosches suddenly emerges from his morbid nostalgia when a former character named Louie (a gangster from Tosches's Cut Numbers) gets his hands on a stolen copy of Dante's manuscript and asks Tosches to authenticate it. That sends the author on a whirlwind tour to Arizona, Chicago, Paris and then London as he tries to verify the work and then determine its worth on the open market. The subplot involving Dante's journey is flat and stale by comparison, despite some impeccable scholarship by Tosches as he chronicles the great poet's efforts and setbacks. Tosches's sense of the shock value of his story line doesn't waver, and there's never a dull moment as he opines about modern culture, the Mob, the Oprah Book Club, Zen editing and the joy of being edited, September 11, the artistic process and anything else that happens to hop into his head for a few pages. The ending is a bit of a letdown, but fans of the one-man literary show that is Nick Tosches will doubtless love this book. Overall, it remains incomplete as a novel because of Tosches's inability to bring Dante to life as a character, although the author's admiration for him as a creative force results in a number of compelling passages. (Sept. 4)Forecast:This attention-grabbing novel should create its own buzz, but Little, Brown is gilding the lily with a 75,000 first printing, national ad campaign, Web marketing and a five-city author tour.

May 15, 2002
Here's an ambitious work: rediscovered in the Vatican Library, the original manuscript of The Divine Comedy ends up with the Mafia in New York and is stolen by an author named Nick Tosches. Paralleling this tale is an account of Dante's effort to write his masterpiece.

Copyright 2002 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

July 1, 2002
Tosches thought so highly of the first line of his latest opus that he excerpted it in the recent collection, "The Nick Tosches Reader" (2000): "Louie pulled off his bra and threw it down on the casket." The image is more than a little disturbing. Louie, a grim reaper of the street, is the epitome of tough--a collector of debts and a cold-blooded killer. Later, Louie hooks up with a tough-guy author and Dante obsessive named, ironically enough, Nick Tosches, and they go to a small town near Palermo in search of the original manuscript of the "Commedia." A fairly high body count ensues. If, in fact, the manuscript is genuine, it could garner the fictional Tosches something in the neighborhood of $1 billion. But at what cost? In his latest, Tosches shows off an impressive breadth of knowledge on the life and times of Dante Alighieri, interweaving the story of Tosches' quest with that of the poet himself, alternating a hard-boiled literary voice with one that attempts to evoke the great work itself. Filled with rants on the whoredom of the publishing world (some taken verbatim from the intros in the "Reader"), autobiographical braggadocio, and history lessons as well as discussions on linguistics, numerology, and theology, this book boldly treads the line between high art and vulgarity, begging the question as to whether it is a masterpiece or just plain pretentious. (Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2002, American Library Association.)