Reviews

This book is a beast, but it delivers. The vivid descriptions of hell, purgatory, and heaven are beautifully written and will stay with you for a long time, if not forever. My favorite is, predictably, Inferno Canto, but Purgatorio almost won out. Honestly, kudos to Dante Alighieri for writing a book to strike cold, hard fear into the hearts of his enemies. If I could write this well, I would too.

morus_jo's review against another edition

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adventurous dark mysterious reflective slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Plot
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? N/A
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

5.0

cvlove's review against another edition

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I do not feel I was getting anything out of this read. Ciardi's rhyming scheme gave it an unintended silly feeling.

armstrong029's review against another edition

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adventurous challenging reflective slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.0

dukegregory's review against another edition

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5.0

Picking this up every day for the past two weeks felt both exhausting and exciting. Reading Dante feels like inhabiting a new world (which is true by definition of the narrative he tells), but he writes from such a different temporal, spatial, and religious perspective than my own that it takes much more effort to uncover the amount going on between the lines. But it was so worth it! Inferno and Purgatorio are funny, horrifying, petty, surly, and wonderfully human. So much human suffering. Is justice possible? Who deserves justice? How can we write poetry about moral/political issues of our time? Is poetry inherently a form of entertainment that renders political engagement facile, impotent, and in bad taste? Dante struggles with this while playing ridiculous allusive games with the reader. Name-dropping constantly from the literary canon preceding him, the iconic Catholics before him, and his various contemporaries, whether he agrees with them or not. It feels like a poem that shouldn't work, but Dante's sense of setting is so rich that his idiosyncratic combination of the imagined and the real create something truly phantasmagorically potent. I didn't love Paradiso as much. Not because the writing worsens (it's really gorgeous throughout (some of the best extended metaphors about light ever)), but because he draws on a Catholic lineage of thinkers and saints and cosmology that is so beyond me. I felt the most consistently lost. Thank God for endnotes. But there is so much even in that bemusement that left me thinking. I mean, Dante tries to describe Paradiso as inhabiting space; light; a space beyond place, possibly in God's mind; and the actual highest sphere of Heaven. Throughout Paradiso, as everything is light, everything and every soul are both there and not there simultaneously. So Dante moves but doesn't move. He feels weightless, but he seems to have a body in motion. And that last canto! I mean, talk about a jaw-dropping series of images. Describing the indescribable by not really describing it, yet you feel something akin to God's light in some way. Unsurprisingly unforgettable. A definite highlight of my year so far. It's a love story, a consideration of the past, a mid-life crisis, a plea to God to break the silence, a product of ego, an appraisal of goodness, a political skewering, a recognition of weakness, and a really beautiful poem.

cassidilia's review against another edition

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Having issues keeping focus

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