In such moments, Pearl's machinery cranks to a halt. Then he informs them that Booth's words come from Shakespeare's Julius Caesar. For instance, six months after Abraham Lincoln's assassination, Holmes tells the others what John Wilkes Booth said upon shooting the president. As with the translation of Italian words, the principals too often explain to one another things they would already know. Sometimes bits and pieces of Pearl's historical color feel overly contrived. The book vividly re-creates the academic life of Cambridge and the social unrest that menaced post-Civil War Boston in the frigid winter of 1865. Whenever a club member quotes Dante in Italian, he immediately, and artificially, follows it with the English phrase, not for his colleagues but for us.Īs deftly as Pearl works out the solution to the murders, the novel's main appeal lies in the depiction of the times. Readers with little knowledge of Dante's epic poem needn't worry they're missing something here, for Pearl masterfully integrates the poet's ideas into his story. The third victim - whose death late in the story you see coming - well, his punishment makes you worry about what's in the water at Ivy League schools. The second, a prominent Unitarian minister, is buried in a hole, his feet set on fire.

The first unfortunate - discovered as the story opens - is a Massachusetts Supreme Court justice eaten alive by maggots. The victims suffer the punishments Dante assigns to sinners in different levels of hell. The sleuthing begins when the club members realize that the deaths come straight out of the very sections they are translating from Dante's Inferno. Pearl sets the men the fictional task of solving a series of grisly murders so specific in their execution that Stephen King might have trouble reading the details.

The translation project elicits this wry pronouncement from Lowell: 'For a few blessed hours in all this I forgot that I was a professor and felt as if I were something real.' Holmes, the voluble physician-writer, endures a strained relationship with his son, Oliver Jr., the future Supreme Court justice, and thrives on the companionship of the club. The gentle, publicly adored Longfellow turns to the translation as a distraction from the untimely death of his young wife. The Dante Club comes happily to life here. This august group, under Longfellow's direction, produced the first American translation of The Divine Comedy. To see his ingenious plot through, Pearl revives mid-19th-century Boston and Cambridge and appropriates the members of the original real-life Dante Club: Henry Wads-worth Longfellow, Oliver Wendell Holmes, James Russell Lowell, George Washington Greene and the publisher James T.

The Dante Club by Matthew Pearl