“Robert Cohen’s Amateur Barbarians raises the question of whether the novel of male midlife crisis is suffering a midlife crisis of its own. . .
If we exempt from consideration the Dante of The Divine Comedy, who finds himself lost in dark woods and shortly thereafter enters the Inferno (this remains preferable to joining a men’s group), writers have been making narratives of midlife crisis since the ’60s, when an increasing level of economic prosperity and a loosening level of morality freed men to stare rapturously into their navels.” [. . .] –Will Blythe, The New York Times, July 16, 2009
S.A. Alenthony, “The Infernova” (2009)
“S.A. Alenthony’s The Infernova is the new book that. . . [turns] the classic vision of the Christian hell upside-down. Retelling the poem from an atheist’s perspective, the story parallels Dante’s descent through nine infamous circles where increasingly pernicious sinners endure their symbolic punishments. The upper circles house the minor offenders: those who lacked clarity or promoted fallacious arguments. The middle levels incarcerate those who preyed upon-and profited from-irrationality: paranormalists, conspiracy theorists, astrologers, and their ilk. Lower and yet darker realms are reserved for religion’s criminals, such as televangelist-frauds, pedophile-priests, and terrorists, while at the pit’s nadir reside the legions of the world’s prophets and a virtual menagerie of the countless gods born of their imaginations.
Dante was famously accompanied on his journey by his revered hero, the Roman poet Virgil. In The Infernova, it is the satirical and irreligious gadfly Mark Twain who takes the role of guide and companion. As their odyssey continues, the dangers of irrational and mystical thinking grow more clear, and their dialogues and encounters with hell’s residents provide a unique tableau on which to set out the arguments against supernaturalism.” —Amazon
“Young Idols With Cleavers Rule the Stage”
“. . .The roots of the butcher as an icon of cool might be found in the writings of Bill Buford, who fashioned an operatic meat hero out of Dario Cecchini, a towering, Dante-spouting butcher from the Chianti countryside. Mr. Buford immortalized him in an article for The New Yorker and in his book ‘Heat.'” [. . .] –Kim Severson, The New York Times, July 7, 2009.
See also: Buford’s book, “Heat: An Amateur’s Adventures as Kitchen Slave, Line Cook, Pasta-Maker, and Apprentice to a Dante-Quoting Butcher in Tuscany” and his 2006 article “Carnal Knowledge: How I Became a Tuscan Butcher” in The New Yorker.
Orhan Pamuk, “The New Life” (1998)
“. . .’My book,’ [Pamuk] says, ‘is my attempt at being visionary through the experience of love. It has a tongue-in-cheek quality about the effect of love on one’s spirit. The intensity of desire is so overwhelming that the narrator is in a new world, in a new life. It’s about maturing through love, reaching a higher level of consciousness.’
The title is appropriated from Dante’s ‘La Vita Nuova,’ Pamuk allows. ‘Dante’s is an account of how he fell in love, along with autobiographical digressions about the effect of love.’ Although it’s impossible to neatly summarize a Pamuk book, ‘The New Life’ is also a meditation on the way literature can affect — or afflict — a nation.” [. . .] –Judy Stone, Orhan Pamuk
Randall Graham and Alex Gross, “Da Vino Commedia”
See the full text of Bonny Doon Vineyard’s “The Vinferno.”
Also cited at Mae’s Cafe and Bakery in Bath, Maine by Anna Schember (Bowdoin, ’12).
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