Maggots & Mayhem!

I’m just sitting at the mega-bookstore coffee shop after work.
I’m thinking about how grand it would be to own a mega-bookstore and be a sort of Book Mogul.
Book Baron!
No.
Book LORD!
I want to be a Book Lord when I grow up!
OK, in all seriousness, this is probably not going to happen. [I’m referring mainly to the “growing up” part!] But I am allowed to dream. Right?
Dream of my future booklordship?
There was never a time in my life when I did not love books to an inordinate degree.
Books are a part of my very DNA. [Deep-rooted Novel Addiction]!

Anyhoo... I’m sitting here looking over my Reading Record, my meticulously kept record of literally everything I have read over the past dozen years or so. And I’m just looking at this past year, with its forty or so books in there.
And I’m wondering [wasn’t yesterday the first day of summer?].... what would I recommend to someone as a good summer read? Talking novels, here. Hmmm.....
Currently I am reading a little book of Nathaniel Hawthorne short stories. Really great, but not beach blanket stuff. Just a few days ago, I finished Don DeLillo’s Cosmopolis. Good book, but I only have one to recommend and so this one is not it.
Hmmm, in the past few months I have read Margaret Atwood’s Alias Grace [super-excellent], F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Tender Is The Night [very good], Douglas Coupland’s Hey Nostradamus! [quite good], two by Jose Saramago: The Gospel According To Jesus Christ [mesmerizing, wondrous], and The Double [stupendously great], Marilynne Robinson’s award-winning Gilead [very good], Ian McEwan’s Saturday [horridly good, awesome even]..... all of these books have been great!
But one book stands out in my mind as being not only very memorable, but exciting, thrilling.... and yes, beach-blankety with a literary thriller-ish sort of twist to it that I think would be good to read through your Ray-Bans while you are soaked in Coppertone and iced-tea.
It is Matthew Pearl’s excellent debut novel, The Dante Club.
I thoroughly enjoyed this book.

The neat thing about reading Matthew Pearl is that you do not have to be familiar with his style, don’t have to be well-versed in what he has written previously (as, say for instance, one may have to be with DeLillo, in my opinion). This is Pearl’s first book! There is an excitement in that, for me. Like diving into a pool without testing the water first.
The author is a graduate of Harvard and Yale Law School and a Dante scholar.
The novel takes place in Boston – 1860’s.
That’s right!
EIGHTEEN-sixties! Don’t run and hide.
The book is about a series of truly horrific and grisly murders that take place in Boston, and specifically, in and around the “Boston Brahmin” society of the day. In the first one, after being somewhat bludgeoned (but not to death) a judge is eaten alive by maggots. Uh-huh!
In the next murder, a minister is buried upside down, and his feet, which are sticking out of the ground, are set aflame.
This other guy gets severely (and I mean, quite really severely) sliced up into ribbons and is left hanging like a side of beef in this deserted castle type place.
Doesn’t this all sound wonderfully beach blankety?

Truthfully, there is a lot of gore in the book. No doubt. But the plot of the book turns upon the fact that the authorities are baffled as to any connectible evidence regarding these crimes. There seems to be no rhyme or reason as to motive.
Little do they know that this wild spate of violence is in fact, motivated by reason and rhyme!
The killer has been fashioning his crimes based upon the punishments described in Dante’s Divine Comedy (specifically the “Inferno” section), and at the same time, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow has been engaged in the production of the English translation of Dante. This is where Pearl’s novel dovetails with history.
At this time in Boston society, there was a Dante Club. It consisted of Longfellow, J.T. Fields, Oliver Wendell Holmes, James Russell Lowell, and George Washington Greene. They were literary giants in their own right, who met as friends frequently, and officially met once a week to discuss that portion of the Dante translation that was currently being completed by the leader, the venerable Longfellow.
As the murders continue to wreak havoc and mayhem and incite terror in the populace, these scholars become embroiled in the case.
All leads lead to Dante! Since Dante’s work was virtually unknown in America at the time, this band of bookish litterati emerge as the only hope in deciphering the connections, anticipating the killer’s next move, and zeroing in on his/her identity. They alone possess the esoteric wherewithal to link the details of the crime with the epic poem itself.
Even though we as readers are on the inside track, the ending is shocking. A surprise.
Pearl blends a wealth of historical fact with this debut novel, but the thing is so wonderfully embellished that I would hesitate to call it “historical fiction.” I would rather call it an intelligent, thrilling, whodunit! It has been compared to Caleb Carr’s The Alienist and equated with the scholarly density of Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose.

It is my pick for a dangity-good summer read!
My hope is that Matthew Pearl will abandon his career in law and focus on writing one hundred more novels.
Don’t we have enough lawyers?