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Title: The Dante Club : A Novel by Matthew Pearl ISBN: 0-375-50529-6 Publisher: Random House Pub. Date: 04 February, 2003 Format: Hardcover Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $24.95 |
Average Customer Rating: 3.86 (98 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: A Wonderful Read
Comment: This is a great book--and an amazingly great first book.
Matthew Pearl has brought well-known historical figures to life in a page-turning mystery.
The reader is in Boston in 1865 and totally swept along by events.I have recommended this book to all my mystery-reading friends and have been thanked by each of them.A wonderfully original idea, beautifully executed.
I look forward to Matthew Pearl's next work.
Rating: 5
Summary: fan from the Cambridge, Massachusetts area
Comment: This week I finished reading The Dante Club, and I was blown away by it. I love Longfellow. The park rangers do a wonderful job conducting tours; it is easy to see that they have a real fondness for Longfellow. However, the author was able to take it one step further and bring the man and his circle of friends to life once again. The book is beautifully written, and I enjoyed the unusual luxury of savoring it slowly. Yes, the maggots did disgust me; but the rest of the book was such perfection that I was willing to deal with them just so I could keep reading. I really liked the personalities of the characters and the action of the story itself. It was very disappointing when I reached the end, not because of the actual ending, but because my fun was over! However, I discovered that my disappointment could be assuaged by reading it all over again! Something I don't ever remember doing before. That coupled with a willingness to share it with friends, but this time assuring them that I want my book returned to me, puts it in a very special category. Finding myself so thoroughly enthralled by the book, I would be remiss if I did not convey my admiration. Mr. Pearl deserves congratulations on a job well done!
Rating: 3
Summary: well crafted but colorless and full of wrong notes
Comment: I enjoyed this book, and I will probably keep an eye out for the author's next one. The mystery is clever and well-crafted, and its unfolding is entertaining enough. The resolution didn't quite convince me, however, and I was more than a little disappointed that my favorite character, Nicholas Rey, the mulatto police officer, was such a minor force in the book.
Unlike some of the reviewers here, I was not dazzled by the book's depiction of 1865 Boston. The author gives us very little in the way of description. The book convinces me that the author knows the city, but it ought to have convinced me that I know it myself. As for the time period, it failed to come alive.
Though we spend a lot of time with the characters' private thoughts, I never felt I'd gotten to know any of them. I never had the sense that they were real, that they had a life that extended beyond the book. There is a muted tone to the book which perhaps is meant to echo the writing style of the protagonists, but which distanced me from the material. Compounding this problem is the author's truly wretched ear for dialogue, which in the end is the book's main failing. Nearly every conversation has two or three tinny lines that jar the reader right out of the story.
As for Dante: there is much lip-service paid in the book to his greatness, but we are never really made to _experience_ his greatness, as we surely would have in a work by Eco or Crowley.
As mentioned by others, the book could have been much better with some judicious editing. I've had that feeling a lot lately. Do editors even exist anymore?
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Title: The Devil in the White City : Murder, Magic, and Madness at the Fair That Changed America by Erik Larson ISBN: 0609608444 Publisher: Crown Pub. Date: 11 February, 2003 List Price(USD): $25.95 |
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Title: The Coffee Trader : A Novel by David Liss ISBN: 0375508546 Publisher: Random House Pub. Date: 04 March, 2003 List Price(USD): $24.95 |
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Title: Lost in a Good Book: A Thursday Next Novel by Jasper Fforde ISBN: 0670031909 Publisher: Penguin USA Pub. Date: 31 March, 2003 List Price(USD): $24.95 |
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Title: Inferno: The Longfellow Translation by Dante, Henry W. Longfellow, Matthew Pearl, Lino Pertile ISBN: 0812967216 Publisher: Modern Library Pub. Date: 04 February, 2003 List Price(USD): $10.95 |
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Title: The Winter Queen : A Novel by Boris Akunin, Andrew Bromfield ISBN: 1400060494 Publisher: Random House Pub. Date: 06 May, 2003 List Price(USD): $19.95 |
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