Inferno

Oh Dante.

My first exposure to Dante was in my senior AP English class. Over the door, my teacher had made a sign saying, "Abandon hope, all ye who enter here." Lovely. (It was actually my favorite class of my high school experience). As part of our unit on mythology, Ms. Taylor went on a rant about Dante. I can't remember if we actually read an excerpt or not. But she told us all about how he descends into Hell, puts people he doesn't like into various circles of Hell, including some who haven't died yet, and then we moved on to Sisyphus. (There is Sisyphus-like punishment for the avaricious - forever pushing rocks and fighting each other in opposing directions). I thought this was very interesting and that maybe someday I would actually read it. Then I promptly forgot about it, until Husband told me I should read it. Except for this random sculpture by Rodin called The Gates of Hell that I took a picture of in France. I just looked it up and it does in fact feature a scene from the Divine Comedy, although I didn't know this when I took the picture. Anyway...



So, a little background on The Husband. He lived in Italy for two years serving a religious mission and is now minoring in Italian and teaching the Italian 101 class at the university we both attend. His Italian class this semester is on The Divine Comedy. As he was reading, he kept talking about the freakish trials Dante experiences and telling me that I should read Inferno. As Halloween was approaching, I thought it would make a good seasonal read. Of course, he read it in Italian. But fortunately his book has one page in Italian and the corresponding in English, so it worked out for me.

It is a very complex book, but the premise is this: Dante fell in love with his donna scala (if I have misspelled this, The Husband will tell me and I will fix it), Beatrice. The donna scala is a woman who is supposed to inspire a man to come closer to God, but you are not supposed to fall in love with her, and Dante does. When she dies, Dante is not sure what to do with himself (and here there is a gap in my knowledge, because all my knowledge comes from Husband's knowledge) but as part of his making up for loving Beatrice, he must journey through hell, purgatory, and paradise and write about it. (His experience with Beatrice living are told in Vita Nuova, another book I should read someday...) Anyway, so Inferno begins with Dante's fearful descent into Hell and all that he observes there.

Here is a lovely diagram of Hell.I could go on and on about the punishments, because they are many and disgusting, but I will just describe a few to keep this post reasonably short.

The river Phlegethon is rather horrible. It is a river of boiling blood that serves as the final resting place for tyrants and murders in the 7th circle of hell.

Another interesting punishment (also in the 7th circle of hell) was for suicides. They became plants that could only speak if you broke them, and blood would pour out. This is because they wanted to stop their natural progression through life, and they rejected the bodies God gave them, so they are now wooden. Dante cries when he breaks the bush to speak to it. He cries a lot, actually, and faints and is distraught - and who could blame him? But he did put some of these people in there (there is a lot of politics and history in Inferno, most of which I understood nothing of) so I don't think he is really crying.

The book was very dark and dreary, and extremely gory (another circle has Mohammed being constantly cleaved down the middle for fraud against God). However, the line that chilled me the most occurred near the beginning. Dante asks,

And after the great sentence --
o master -- will these torments grow, or else
be less, or will they be just as intense?
And he to me, "Remember now your science,
which says that when a thing has more perfection,
so much the greater is its pain or its pleasure.
Though these accursed sinners never shall
attain the true perfection, yet they can
expect to be more perfect then than now. (p. 57)

Shivers. There is so much more to this book, I wish I could expound all that I got from it, which is definitely only a fraction of the whole. It was nice to ask The Husband questions about it. I read the Mandelbaum translation, which I highly recommend. It might also be good to get a study guide or dictionary of things in Dante. (We have one, but it is in Italian, so I didn't use it... obviously. I just used my human dictionary).

I cannot possibly give this book a rating. I didn't always enjoy reading it, and I was very glad to be done with it. But it is a rich novel full of many things to think about. I think everyone should read it. I am still trying to decide if I should read Purgatory and Paradise. Husband isn't enjoying those as much, and I'm sure at any rate they are less shocking than Inferno. I'm glad I read this one, so I'll probably get to the other ones after a buffer period. Read it. But get help.

The Razor's Edge

Mmmm. Can I just start by saying that I love this book? This is the second Maugham novel I have read (the other was Of Human Bondage). Although this didn't quite top Of Human Bondage, it very nearly tied with it in my book-affections.

The cast of characters -

Isabel - a beautiful, charming, but shrewd and possibly even manipulative woman who knows what she wants and isn't afraid to go after it.

Elliot - Isabel's uncle. A Europhile who lives for society. He pays diligent attention to his clothes and his parties. The greatest tragedy of his life is exclusion from the social event of the season. And even though it's ridiculous, you can't help but cry with him.

Gray Maturin - a handsome guy, not too interesting but impossible not to like. He has his ups and downs. His most endearing trait is his tender love for his family.

Sophie MacDonald - an intelligent, clever girl who jumps into the world of drugs and promiscuity after tragedy strikes her life.

Larry Darrell - A pilot wounded in WWI. After a tragic experience shakes him in the war, Larry launches a great search for truth. His travels lead him to Paris, Germany, India, and back to America as he tries to find God and his own reason for living.

and finally...

W. Somerset Maugham - He actually narrates this novel. His conversations with the various characters provide the content for the novel. He comes off like Nick in The Great Gatsby - certainly present and connected to all events, but never quite getting mixed in them. I loved his little observations and quips about the characters. I especially loved his abrupt honesty (which at one point instigates a butter dish being thrown at his head). I felt like I knew him better, and I definitely could tell this was the man who wrote Of Human Bondage - little comments he would make showed that his opinions were the same, particularly in this quote:

Passion doesn't count the cost. Pascal said that the heart has its reasons that reason takes no account of. If he meant what I think, he meant that when passion seizes the heart it invents reasons that seem not only plausible but conclusive to prove that the world is well lost for love. It convinces you that honour is will sacrificed and that shame is a cheap price to pay. Passion is destructive. It destroyed Antony and Cleopatra, Tristan and Isolde, Parnell and Kitty O'Shea. And if it doesn't destroy it dies. It may be then that one is faced with the desolation of knowing that one has wasted the years of one's life, that one's brought disgrace upon oneself, endured the frightful pang of jealousy, swallowed every bitter mortification, that one's expended all one's tenderness, poured out all the riches of one's soul on a poor drab, a fool, a peg on which one hung one's dreams, who wasn't worth a stick of chewing gum (p. 170).

If that doesn't reek of Of Human Bondage, I don't know what else does.

The other quote that I have to cite occurs when Maugham and Isabel are discussing Larry's purpose. I just had to laugh at this, and I will explain why in a moment. Maugham explains to Isabel, "Some people have a disinterested desire for knowledge. It's not an ignoble desire. [...] Perhaps it will be a sufficient satisfaction merely to know, as it's a sufficient satisfaction to an artist to produce a work of art." (p. 91).

I have a very good friend who is a bit of a "Larry" himself, and I emailed him this quote, telling him I thought it described him pretty well. Here is what he wrote back to me:

It's funny how on the mark you are though, with the quote. Right now I'm in a public library in Reno reading the last few chapters of a physics text book because I want to know about light (remember relativity? haha I still don't get it...) I finished reading ALL the electromagnetism chapters about a month ago, because I couldn't remember them from high school and I never really understood it all that well, but now I think I've got that stuff down pat. Yesterday and the day before I was reading the official c programming language manual, and I'm proud to say that I'm a moderately proficient c programmer. I've been reading a lot about computers, and I'm running a linux operating system, because I think that if I'm ever going to do anything, I'm going to need to use computers to do them. I built a robot about a month and a half ago, it has two wheels and it drives around towards the light. I'm reading two pdfs I found online, one on probability and one on complex analysis, and I'm reading a textbook on multivariable calculus. And I'll tell you, honestly the reason I'm doing all this isn't because I enjoy learning (although I do, most of the time), or because I'm fascinated in any individual subject (although I am, for most of them), it's because I want to KNOW. I want to acquire, I want to possess knowledge. I want to understand. So I guess I am the artist who just wants to produce the work of art, but I'd hardly call that disinterested.

And there you have it. Although those are my friend's words, not Larry's words, I think that sort of sums up Larry's thought on life as well, although he is pursuing truth through Hinduism and philosophy rather than trying to develop a new way to test neurons.

So in sum? (After all that quoting...) This is a character driven book. It is a thinker. Definitely not a lighthearted read. However, Maugham is a great writer, and so all the heaviness still flows pretty smoothly. I found myself caring deeply for the characters, even when they made me angry. This book is a solid 4.5. I think I am going to buy a copy one of these days. Meanwhile, I have a document with all the quotes I loved. :)

Oh, I forgot. As I was reading this, I thought this book was an interesting foil for This Side of Paradise. Both Larry and Amory Blaine are trying to find themselves, searching and trying different things and experimenting with love, but Larry is selfless and reaches out to humanity, while Amory is centered on himself (the line I most remember is "Amory sat and thought about himself"). Anyone read both of these? Any thoughts?