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A review by jasperfrancis
Inferno by Dante Alighieri
challenging
dark
medium-paced
4.25
" "'Father, we'd be in much less pain if you were eating us: you clothed us with this wretched flesh, so strip it off again.' [...] Then, what grief could not do was done by hunger." He said this, rolled his eyes, and once again he got the wretched skull between his teeth, as savage as a dog is with a bone." -Inferno, Canto XXXIII.
This reverberates through my head, and will for a long, long time. It makes me want to cry, word for word, and is unlike anything else Dante wrote in this book.
It's among this that Dante uses the sheer power of poetry to put people in hell who hadn't died yet in his time; the Florentine Gianni Buiamonte de Becchi, who died eleven years after Dante threw him into the Inferno to die; Guido Cavalcanti, placed in the Heretics' ring as a prophecy for his death only months later; and this shows how, through art and speech, we can perceive what hasn't happened and feel it just as much as reality. These deaths wouldn't have been so significant if they had truly happened before conception. This is the power of the poet. Language and history, humanity and beliefs--- these are most influential when they are stories.
Stories allow us the headroom to fill in the blanks: how horror media shows only so much, so that our brains, the most violent instrument we have, make up the rest of the tale. In this case, we can imagine the off-page suffering of the sinners, and their lives before and after their sinful acts. We can, through the untold, create more horror than the author. Satan eats the sinners in Judecca, and we only see this for two pages. How much longer will he eat them? How much longer will a father in Antenora, feed on another frozen sinner's skull and feel not only the guilt he felt at his child's death, but the hunger it caused him? The Inferno is temporary through Dante's lense. He ventures through it for only days, and he won't watch the sinners carry out the rest of their term; infinity. They live on in our heads, eating at each other, being eaten, thawing, freezing, running, chasing, built and destroyed. The magic of the Inferno is that Dante is alive. He can only feel their suffering so much-- and so he becomes merciless, gradually losing sympathy, watching violence carried out in the name of God. Dante may have left the Inferno, escaping to see the stars again, but the sinners still freeze, burn, eat, cry. That is the unseen making itself in a dreadful half-view, the kind where we don't get to see the full film, but are haunted by clips, trailers, bits of impact that patter in our skulls and dreams. Dante will never know the Inferno how it is: he has walked away, though hell waits.
This reverberates through my head, and will for a long, long time. It makes me want to cry, word for word, and is unlike anything else Dante wrote in this book.
It's among this that Dante uses the sheer power of poetry to put people in hell who hadn't died yet in his time; the Florentine Gianni Buiamonte de Becchi, who died eleven years after Dante threw him into the Inferno to die; Guido Cavalcanti, placed in the Heretics' ring as a prophecy for his death only months later; and this shows how, through art and speech, we can perceive what hasn't happened and feel it just as much as reality. These deaths wouldn't have been so significant if they had truly happened before conception. This is the power of the poet. Language and history, humanity and beliefs--- these are most influential when they are stories.
Stories allow us the headroom to fill in the blanks: how horror media shows only so much, so that our brains, the most violent instrument we have, make up the rest of the tale. In this case, we can imagine the off-page suffering of the sinners, and their lives before and after their sinful acts. We can, through the untold, create more horror than the author. Satan eats the sinners in Judecca, and we only see this for two pages. How much longer will he eat them? How much longer will a father in Antenora, feed on another frozen sinner's skull and feel not only the guilt he felt at his child's death, but the hunger it caused him? The Inferno is temporary through Dante's lense. He ventures through it for only days, and he won't watch the sinners carry out the rest of their term; infinity. They live on in our heads, eating at each other, being eaten, thawing, freezing, running, chasing, built and destroyed. The magic of the Inferno is that Dante is alive. He can only feel their suffering so much-- and so he becomes merciless, gradually losing sympathy, watching violence carried out in the name of God. Dante may have left the Inferno, escaping to see the stars again, but the sinners still freeze, burn, eat, cry. That is the unseen making itself in a dreadful half-view, the kind where we don't get to see the full film, but are haunted by clips, trailers, bits of impact that patter in our skulls and dreams. Dante will never know the Inferno how it is: he has walked away, though hell waits.