Dante in America

Before he left home this morning, my Beloved made sure my shoes matched. I got through all of yesterday with only one odd look from a stranger in the street and that mightn't have been shoe-related.

In other news, over the break I read The Dante Club by Matthew Pearl. This was a rollicking murder mystery set in Boston in the 1860s. A team of scholars, led by the poet Longfellow (the only one I'd actually heard of), is translating Dante's Divine Comedy into English for the first time in America (although quite why this is such a big deal when there were already an awful lot of British English translations never really convinces me). Someone is using the Dante's punishments of the wicked in the circles of Hell as the models for murders! Can the translators stop him or her before it's all too late?

What's good fun about this is that the novel uses real literary men (with lovingly described facial hair arrangements) as the detectives. Some of them find it extremely difficult to get out of their fireside armchairs and traipse around the dangerous back streets of Boston. What's not so good is that I thought it was one of those mysteries where you can pick the murderer out but it's more of a Sherlock Holmes revelation at the last minute mystery so there was no need to think much at all.

There is a lot of cool period detail. I've been to Boston in the depths of winter and could visualise walking through the same locations. It was really interesting to read about the social pressures caused by the soldiers returning from the civil war and how the underground railway worked. One of the main characters is the first black policeman appointed to the Boston Police force because of his conspicuous bravery during the war but he wasn't allowed to wear a uniform, carry a gun or arrest a white man. It was disappointing to find out this character was fictitious. But some of this detail was a bit on the "I read this fascinating detail so I have to put it in" side - do we really need to know there was an outbreak of distemper among Boston horses in 1865?

One of the major plotlines is about the lack of academic freedom at Harvard. The college corporation was very resistant to studying modern languages, especially "decadent" Catholic literature. This seemed very odd, but then very little should surprise me about Amercians any more.

Anyway, it was a good, fun read but I'd take the hype on Mr Pearl's website with a bit of salt.