Tag Archives: authors: dante alighieri

Inferno

fiction July 29, 2014 Leave a comment

Confession: I love Dan Brown books.

Yes, I know the writing is awful. Yes, I know the character is a self-insert Gary Stu. Yes, I know the same thing happens over and over again in every novel. Yes, I know I should be ashamed.

Totally not, though.

I read The DaVinci Code at about 16 because it drummed a lot of controversy. Announcing that I wanted to read it was an exciting moment for my mom because after refusing to read anything on which I wasn’t going to be tested that wasn’t Harry Potter, I finally expressed an interest in a book that was unprompted by her. Middle school and high school didn’t encourage reading and it took me a long time to get over it.

Anyway, with The DaVinci Code, I was going through something of a rebellion at the time – not anything dangerous, just trying to come to grips with the fact that I’d never be the good Catholic my extended family wanted me to be and would receive a fair amount of ridicule from them for it. So…enter Dan Brown with an exaggerated anti-Catholic Church novel. (Fun Fact: I came to terms with my under-developed religion area of the brain unscathed, and eventually graduated from a Catholic university. I even sometimes miss said Catholic university).

I next read Angels and Demons the summer after, and I enjoyed that even more than the previous book. It was actually the first book featuring Robert Langdon, and it was in the same trashy thriller style. The Lost Symbol came next, and then, this year (well, published last year but read this year), Inferno.

For some reason I didn’t like Inferno as much as previous stories. Maybe I’m outgrowing trashy thrillers (unlikely), but I didn’t find it as fun and took awhile to get through it. I was totally blindsided by the twist (seriously, you’d think after all this time, I’d have seen it coming, but nah), so that was enjoyable, but the overall experience wasn’t as good as my previous experiences.

I think my biggest issue was the use of amnesia as a plot point. I didn’t enjoy not really knowing what was going on through most of the story (it’s why I didn’t like the ‘Bourne Trilogy’ too). Langdon was clueless since he was the one with amnesia, and so the reader was as well. The premise was interesting enough – a mad genius created a virus that would infect everyone and, presumably, wipe out a ton of the planet’s population because humans cannot exist on this planet at the rate they are populating it (and he takes it into his own hands to fix this). And he was obsessed with Dante’s The Divine Comedy and left all kinds of adorable clues to finding his virus that had to do with Dante. The World Health Organization gets involved. There’s a mo-ped chase.

I felt like Brown answered too many questions at once. I would have preferred if the answers were more spread out throughout the book, to make for better pacing of the story. I wish we’d seen a little more about the Provost and the Consortium. Of everyone in the story who wasn’t Langdon, the shadowy organization that helped the mad genius accomplish his research was the most fascinating.

What I did like about the novel – as I like about all Brown’s novels – is a) Robert Langdon is endearing because he’s such a raging nerd and b) the setting. Inferno ran through Florence (obviously, as this was Dante’s beloved home) and some other parts of Europe. 3 of 4 of Brown’s Langdon books take place in Europe – Italy specifically. As someone who would like to explore Europe, these novels make me really excited about it for some reason. (I don’t know why. There are so many things to psych you up about Europe and my brain chooses Dan Brown books. Go figure.)

I also like all the symbolism and the history that goes into the book. This, combined with the setting, really make the novels enjoyable in spite of the fact that the writing can be ridiculous at times. They make the story very real – which it needs, since a middle-aged but handsome Harvard professor who swims and is obsessed with his Harris tweed jacket and a Mickey Mouse watch from his parents doesn’t exactly scream “HEY THIS IS A LESSON IN REALISM!”

But as I said, history, symbolism and setting make the books interesting. In spite of the fact that Brown’s books can be clumsy, it’s clear that he does put a lot of research into them and blends facts and fiction into a fairly gripping – if sometimes heavy handed – web.

Overall, I’d recommend Inferno. I didn’t like it as much as Brown’s other Langdon stories, but I was entertained. When it comes to trashy thrillers, that is key, and Inferno doesn’t disappoint in that regard.

Literary References on Mad Men, Season 06

fiction May 23, 2013 Leave a comment

Because I love Mad Men AND books!

To be clear, I did NOT write this, but I liked it a lot, so I’m sharing it. It was published here at Words and Film.

Unpacking the Literary References Informing ‘Mad Men’ Season 06
by Christine Spines

“The Crash,” the latest aptly titled episode of “Mad Men,” is a runaway toboggan ride through the emotional wasteland of Don Draper’s psyche that’s been analyzed and dissected as much as the Zapruder film at this point. Love it or hate it, “Mad Men” has now entered the realm of myth with Don Draper doubling as an Orpheus-like tormented soul who has descended into the underworld under the illusion that he can reclaim his idealized woman (the mother he never had) only to discover he’s powerless over his desire for instant gratification, ultimately dooming himself to a life of misery. If Freud were on the case, he would have diagnosed Don with textbook repetition compulsion, a self-destructive pattern of behavior, described in Remembering, Repeating and Working Through, as repeating the circumstances of a traumatic event over and over again.

We’ll leave any further deconstruction of Don’s psyche to the professionals — the legions of bloggers who parse the show’s subtext in weekly recap posts that read more like the abstracts for a PhD dissertation on the moral degradation of American ideals in the late 1960s. But the proliferation of  literary references (both implicit and explicit) peppered throughout this season, particularly in episode 8, bears further scrutiny. And because everything in “Mad Men,” from Roger Sterling’s streamline moderne office furniture down to the pile of cigarette butts at Don’s feet, is freighted with meaning, there must be something to be gleaned from reading into the featured books and myriad author quotes embedded throughout Matthew Weiner’s multilayered dialogue.

Literary Cameo: The Inferno by Dante Alighieri
This season opened with Don splayed out on a Hawaii beach reading Dante’s Inferno, with a voiceover narration of the famous passage that remains the best and most succinct description of a midlife crisis ever written: “Midway through our journey I went away from the straight road and found myself in a dark wood.” There’s clearly more at play here than the garden variety midlife mortality panic behind Don’s descent into a state of sin-soaked anomie. Don is a man who manufactures his own despair, trapping himself on a treadmill of torment, even while vacationing in paradise with his smart, beautiful wife.

Takeaway: Don is damned to a hell of his own making but it’s not inconceivable that he’ll find some sort of redemption since he’s still hovering in outer circles, between lust and gluttony.

Literary Cameo: Ralph Waldo  Emerson
In the episode entitled “Man with a Plan,” Peggy Olsen concocts a fantasy in which her menschy boss is reading Emerson, the godfather of transcendentalism and great proponent of individuality and man’s inherent power to prevail over society’s corrupt  influences.

Takeaway: Emerson was an optimist and an ethicist. In other words, he was the anti-Don, which is precisely what Peggy was looking for when she fled her deteriorating mentor for her new boss’ high-minded ideals.

Literary Cameo: Annabel Lee by Edgar Allan Poe
“The Crash” quickly spiraled into a drug-fueled stream-of-consciousness trip into the messy creative process involved in straddling the line between art and commerce. During one of the copy team’s many incoherent brainstorming sessions, Stan, the show’s skirt-chasing art director, quotes Poe’s last published poem, Annabel Lee, about a man fixated on a beautiful woman he can never possess.

Takeaway: This poem clearly has resonances for both Stan and Don and the rest of the dirty dogs working at SCDP. Romanticizing lost loves is an affliction we all suffer from in one way or another. But in the most recent episode, this compulsion to relive (and rewrite) the past has debilitated Don and endangered his family and professional life. It’s no accident Poe’s work continues to strike terror in the hearts of readers.

Literary Cameo: My Heart Leaps Up by William Wordsworth
In episode 8, the creative team continues to try to crack the code to the Chevy campaign with a half-baked idea about the nostalgia associated with a father giving his son his first car. Peggy then chimes in with an offhanded aside adding that “the child is the father of the son.” This line was cribbed from the above Wordsworth poem, about how our memories of childhood fill the well we tap throughout our lives to be reminded of who we should aim to be.

Takeaway: In an episode overstocked with flashbacks  to Don’s abusive childhood, this poem offers a kind of solace in its message that there are gifts to be found in an unhappy childhood if we submit to heeding the lessons embedded in our own pain.

Literary Cameo: Rosemary’s Baby by Ira Levin
Levin’s terrifying novel about a pregnant woman who is convinced the satanic cabal living in her building has targeted her baby is ominously introduced in a scene in which Sally Draper has been left alone to tend to her younger brothers. Placing this literary creep-fest in the hands of a child home alone signals that some of our fears actually turn out to be worse than we’d imagined.

Takeaway: Both Don and Sally are more vulnerable than either acknowledges. And it also points to the fact that Don may feel like he’s become the grown-up version of satan’s spawn.