inferno

I recently went to National Book Store to buy some school supplies and left with not even a single pen but instead hauled out a big plastic bag containing books. One of the four books I bought, and also the one I’m reading at the moment, is The Dante Club by Matthew Pearl. I’ve heard of the book a year ago but was unable to find a copy until the other day.

The Dante Club is set in Boston in the year 1865. A small group of elite literary men and Harvard professors are about to publish an English translation of Dante Alighieri’s The Divine Comedy but the members of the Harvard Corporation are bent on stopping this venture. This strengthens the resolve of the Dante Club to introduce Dante’s vision of hell to America. Their plans fall apart when a series of gruesome murders is reported and they realize that the killings embody the description of punishments from Dante’s Inferno. I have yet to get far in my reading but all these takes me back to the first time I read the works of Dante.

I was a senior in high school when we began reading excerpts from The Divine Comedy for an English class. As a project for our last quarter we were tasked to “rewrite” the Canto I of Dante’s Inferno and from there create a comic strip. One of my groupmates wrote quite an interesting script and we set to illustrate it in washes of watercolor. The finished product turned out quite well. Good enough at least to warrant praise from our teacher who insisted on keeping the comic strip and using it as an example for students the following year. Dante was forgotten afterwards amidst the flurry of exams and graduation.

I was already a sophomore in college when I decided it would be nice to actually read through the whole Divine Comedy. I bought a copy of Inferno and started reading it. I did pretty well reading the first few pages but as Dante descended into hell and introduced revolting punishments I found myself slowing down in my reading. I would read only about 5 pages a day trying hard to grasp the meaning of each verse. I’m not sure if I actually finished the book. What I’m sure of is that I never got to reading Purgatorio and Paradiso. Now, reading The Dante Club, I wish I had.


Another “episode” comes to mind when I think of Dante. There was this movie I saw as a junior in college. It was set in Death Valley in the desserts of North Mojave with Dante’s View serving as its glorious backdrop.

One afternoon as the two main characters sat watching the sun set over the valley the first one turned to the other and asked,

“Did you know that you lived this close to hell?”

The second just laughed and said, “I don’t know. But I kinda like it.”



Hell is everywhere.