The Dante Club

As I was looking through the internet I came across a book called The Dante Club. Sounded interesting enough, so I looked it up and it has quite the ingenious plot. It is set in 1865 Boston and there is a group of people working on the America's first translation of Dante's Divine Comedy. As this club is almost finished with the translation, people start to get murdered around the city in similar fashion to Dante's punishments in the Inferno. The first person they find is a man who did not choose to support or stop the escaped slaves, and he is murdered and left by a white flag in his garden where maggots and hornets can prick him. This is a clear relation to Dante's punishment of the uncommitted who did not choose sides and are forever chasing a white flag while being stung.
The club also discovers reverend Talbot, who was bribed by the Harvard Corporation to stop the translation because they viewed the influence of Dante's work as bad because he was a foreigner. Talbot is found dead in a cemetery buried upside down, with his feet burned. This is a clear reference to the punishment that Dante gives for simony as he has the popes buried upside down with their feet burning.
This continues until they eventually find the killer who is a war veteran with some mental problems (obviously) who things that Dante is the only one that understands how to deliver justice to a city and how to fix it.
Overall this is a pretty cool book. It is clearly influenced by Dante's Inferno, and taking a somewhat modern view on things, similar to how Sandow Birk's film did. It provides us to see the way in which people can interpret Dante's work in the present and apply it to things that are going on around the time. The use of Dante as a means of cleaning up the city is interesting since Dante obviously has a political agenda in writing his comedy and uses it as a mean to condemn those he sees as committing sins against God or nature. This book not only relates to Dante's Inferno because it uses contrapasso in a similar way as Dante does, but also because it has historical figures in the book as well as fictional one. The book's main character is Henry Wadsworth Longfellow who was actually once of the first American's to translate Dante's Inferno, which is what he is doing in The Dante Club as the main character. However, there are also fictional characters such as Talbot and other people who are murdered. This is a reference to Dante's Inferno in which we see historical figures like Farina, and Cavalcanti, and the different popes, but we also see fictional characters from the Aenead and other books from Dante's time. This shows a similar representation between Inferno and The Dante Club.