In the poem, Dante finds Love; in Rubin, a grateful lover.
A pleasant, informative journey toward perfect love with Dante (and Virgil and Beatrice) through Italy, France, hell, purgatory, and heaven.
Rubin, who has ventured previously into Italian history (The Princessa: Machiavelli for Women, 1997, etc.), this time moves into the Middle Ages and offers an almost ecstatic exegesis of The Divine Comedy, with breezy commentary on all three of its canticles. The author has a lot on her plate: she follows Dante around Italy (and into France and back again) as he is composing the poem; she sketches the cultural and religious history of the age; she explains both the structure and the significance of the Comedy; she shows how it has influenced other writers and how it resonates in contemporary life. And so throughout the text we find allusions to great Dante scholars and teachers (e.g., John Freccero at NYU), samples of translations from Ciardi, Mandelbaum, Pinsky, Merwin, Wicksteed, and even a quick taste of the Binyon-Pound collaboration. Rubin sprinkles her text as well with references to Harry Potter and Pudd’n’head Wilson, Freud and Fellini, People magazine and Matthew Pearl (and Longfellow!), Keats and Eliot, Joyce and Titian, Nijinsky and Jung. She includes details we won’t forget (Tuscan paper comprised old underwear, animal parts, hemp), a few hackneyed images (a butterfly emerging from a cocoon), and some anecdotes that aren’t quite accurate (the story of Shelley’s drowning and cremation and of Trelawny’s snatching from the fire the poet’s unconsumed heart). Still, there are some eye-openers here for general readers and those unfamiliar with the poem. Rubin’s summary of the theory that Dante’s views of Gothic cathedrals in France inspired the architecture of the Comedy, her emphasis on the importance of memory in medieval societies, her unfettered enthusiasm for the poem—these are real attractions. As, for the most part, is her felicitous prose.
In the poem, Dante finds Love; in Rubin, a grateful lover.Pub Date: April 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-7432-3446-4
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2004
BOOK REVIEW
There's a Faulkner market — no question of that. But for those on its outskirts, watching eagerly for growth, development, maturity in his work, there is disappointment, here as in Pylon. There is more in the sinister, sultry atmosphere to recall Sanctuary. But the story is indirect to the point of artificiality; the style marred by hyphenated words, manufactured words, until you lose the sense in the glut of verbiage. A depraved story of degenerates in a Southern family gone to seed — of Colonel Sutpen building his tribe by incest, perversion, miscegenation and lust. There is tragedy here, but the drawing is so out of scale that the effect is weakened. — In spite of all this, the book — on Faulkner's name — will sell, and rent.
Pub Date: Oct. 26, 1936
ISBN: 0679600728
Page Count: -
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 15, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1936
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis...
Privately published by Strunk of Cornell in 1918 and revised by his student E. B. White in 1959, that "little book" is back again with more White updatings.
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis (whoops — "A bankrupt expression") a unique guide (which means "without like or equal").Pub Date: May 15, 1972
ISBN: 0205632645
Page Count: 105
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 28, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1972
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