“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
“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.
Monique Wittig, “Across the Acheron” (1987)
“Serving as her own protagonist, Wittig. . . confronts implications of female oppression as she struggles against gale winds and knifelike sands on her way to Acheron, the river of tears. Led by a woman always referred to as ‘Manastabel, my guide,’ ‘Mana’ embodies the idea of universal order. Wittig’s alter ego passes through various circles of Hell and Limbo, occasionally ascending to such earthly gathering places as a laundromat and a parade ground. Wherever she goes, she sees women flogged and tortured, castrated and dismembered, collared, chained and dragged unprotesting by their male masters through streets awash with blood, bones and excrement.
“In the midst of feasting, the women starve, dragging their emaciated bodies to serve their masters and afterwards licking up the half-chewed bits of skin and gristle, the spewed-out bones. Yet in the Angels’ Kitchen the copper gleams, the fruits glisten, cauldrons bubble, and the women chorus, ‘Soup, beautiful soup.’ A Guernica of the human (feminist) condition, a blacker, bleaker, more vengeful Alice’s tea party, this is a novel as graphic as a painting, whose brilliance its translators have creditably preserved.” —Publishers Weekly (retrieved on July 7, 2009)
____
“Monique Wittig’s last novel Virgile, non was written in 1985. The English title is Across the Acheron. The story is told by a female character called «Wittig» who is guided throughout hell by another woman called Mastanabal. The protagonist Wittig keeps the name of her author and, the main character of the Divine Comedy is named after the author as well. Wittig started this journey to rejoin a woman who is her “providence”. Wittig depicts these three reigns as follows: the sandstorms represent hell, the cafes where the travelers sit and sip tequila represent limbo, and glimpses represent paradise. The journey of Wittig culminates in a paradise of angels on motorcycles resembling dykes on bikes. People in Hell are not damned: they are victims. Mastanabal – unlike Virgil – does not justify the tortures inflicted on them. The victims are women, the punishments represent the social constraints, and the two voyagers are their liberators.
“Wittig writes, ‘I mentioned Dante, whose Divine Comedy was my matrix. Virgile, non does not mean “no to Virgil,” the poet I love, but it says “no” to Virgil as a guide, since in this book the guide is Manastabal. Manastabal is far, far from being as sweet as the sweet Virgil.’ (Wittig, Monique. Reading and Comments: Virgile, non/ Across the Acheron in Queer Ideas, The David R. Kessler Lectures in Lesbian and Gay Studies, New York: The Feminist Press at the City University of New York, 2003. Queer Ideas, 131).” –Chiara Caputi, CUNY Staten Island, Ph.D. candidate)
Mark E. Rogers, “Samurai Cat Goes to Hell” (1998)
In the last of the Samurai Cat series, Rogers uses Dante’s scheme of hell to frame the action.
“This comedic Inferno includes Nazi tyrannosaurs in dinosaur-sized tanks, characters resembling figures from the Oz books, Virtuous Pagans galore and Satan, who, though trapped in ice at the bottom of hell, wears pink panties and can send out projections in the shape of bad actors. The heroes are aided by felines from the other Samurai Cat books, a guardian angel named Henry and a mysterious ‘itinerant preacher’ who looks like Clint Eastwood.” –Publishers Weekly, Amazon
James Merrill, “Divine Comedies” (1976)
Merrill’s collection of poems includes one, “The Book of Ephraim,” which is an account of “conversations held, via the Ouija board, with dead friends and spirits in ‘another world.'” –Stephen Spender, The New York Review of Books, December 21, 1978
- « Previous Page
- 1
- …
- 20
- 21
- 22
- 23
- 24
- …
- 31
- Next Page »
