The Dante Club/ The Poe Shadow

Matthew Pearl has written two books (that I know of anyway) THe Dante Club I found entertaining, interesting and informative. I also found it to be a nicely put together book.

The Poe Shadow on the other had I give mixed reviews. On the one had it is entertaining, interesting and informative, but it seems to suffer from technical difficulties. I think if it had been editied more carefully and tightened up it would have been a far better book. There seems to be to many things in the book that just do not hold up.

David Perrings

I have only read the first one and so long ago that I can't remember it. I'd have to dig out my book journal to refresh. Heard such mixed reviews of the second that I haven't bothered with it.

What interested you most about The Dante Club, David?

The main thing the Dante Club did was to peak my interest to read Dante's Divine Comedy. Which I did for the first time. Looks like it is going to take a few more reading to really get it.

david

Yes, I thoroughly enjoyed The Dante Club, too! I loved the intellectual challenge of finding bits and pieces of Dante's "Divine Comedy" everywhere throughout Matthew Pearl’s Dante Club. But mostly, I fell head-over-heels in love with the opportunity—through the transport magic of fiction—to become personally acquainted with Longfellow, Holmes, and Lowell.

When I heard that Pearl was focusing his next book around Edger Alan Poe, I could hardly wait. I wanted Pearl to transport me back to Poe’s world. You see, Poe, was my all-time favorite childhood author. But I was sorely disappointed. Try as I did, I could not get into The Poe Shadow. In fact, I gave up—and I rarely give up on a book. Yes, something major was missing, but I wasn’t even interested enough to finish the book, analyze it, and figure out what it was that was I didn’t like. Sorry, I can’t help you there.

But, I am very glad that Pearl piqued your interest to read Dante's Divine Comedy. That’s certainly a plus. Something good did come of my failed Poe Shadow effort, too—it piqued my interest to go back and reread my favorite Poe poems and short stories. So, I thank Matthew Pearl for that, too.

msbaba,

thanks for your comments, yes i agree with you the interestes that his books pique is so fun and refressing.

I think the Poe Shadow could be a really great book to read if he had done the work to clean it up.

david

I finished the Poe Shadow.

I think if the author had written the story and left out the Barron and Napolean, he could have constructed a much cleaner story. It seems to me as if he was written to parrallel stories and some where along the way desided to combine them both into one story. To many dupan's, dupa, and duponts what ever.

When dupont was first introduced all i could think of was "elementary my dear watson" so it was helpfull to find in Wikapedia and account the Holmes was actually inspired by Poe's fictional character.

The final explaination by DuPont in the courtroom near the end of the book was way to intricately detailed for my taste.

But the most off putting part about the book for me was that in the very beginning Clark takes up the cause of solving Poe's death as if on a "Mission from God" without having any real reason that i could see to take up the cause.

while the book had its moments, overall it think it collapsed into silliness.

david perrings

Ah, now I remember this book a bit more clearly. From my book journal entry for TDC (I don't own this one, so it's not in my catalogue to review) -

The political and social atmosphere really hit hard in this book. Especially the plight and circumstances of Nicholas Rey. The absolute social acceptability of thinking that whites were far superior to blacks is really astounding. The same held true for other nationalities – Italian and Irish being representative in this book. Everyone who was white and not from these countries looked down on them as scum, even when just barely a generation before they themselves were immigrants and foreigners. It’s so hypocritical. One of the reasons the head of Harvard didn’t want The Devine Comedy translated was because he thought that Italian was a coarse language and Italians were ill bred and the whole book was nothing but Catholic, superstitious nonsense. There was even a scene where he and his fellows burned books about evolution, just to drive the point home. It seems unreal to me that men of learning would want to ban or burn any book, but I guess they are just as afraid to let go of the status quo as the rest of us.