“. . .’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
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)
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“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)
Gloria Naylor, Linden Hills (1985)
“Like Amiri Baraka in The Systems of Dante’s Hell (1965), Miss Naylor has adapted Dante’s Inferno to her own fictional purposes – in this instance a tale of lost black souls trapped in the American dream. The setting is Linden Hills, an upper-middle-class black community built on a huge plot of land owned by the mysterious Nedeed family (the locale is not specified). Purchased by Luther Nedeed in 1820 – after he had sold his octoroon wife and six children into slavery and moved from Tupelo, Miss., we are told – the land has remained under the proprietorship of the Nedeeds for more than 150 years. Luther (read Lucifer), as all the males in the Nedeed family are named, opened a funeral parlor, then developed the land and leased sections to black families. His sons and grandsons, all of whom are physical copies of the original landowner, furthered his plan – to establish a showcase black community. That community, as the original Luther says, would not only be an ‘ebony jewel’ representing black achievement, but also ‘a beautiful, black wad of spit right in the white eye of America.'” –Mel Watkins, “The Circular Driveways of Hell,” New York Times (March 3, 1985)
“Gloria Naylor’s Linden Hills follows two young black male poets on their downward journey through a prosperous community built for blacks who aspire to live out a white-patented dream of social advancement. Naylor’s appropriation of Dante’s Inferno as master narrative for this landscape of private torments (a white model for black society) replicates the choice made by Linden Hills itself. The ironies of this are rich and difficult to control: but the attention paid to the sufferings of women in this arrangement adds something quite new to the English-language Dante tradition.” –David Wallace, “Dante in English,” in Rachel Jacoff’s The Cambridge Companion to Dante, 2007
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
Kim Paffenroth, “Valley of the Dead (The Truth Behind Dante’s Inferno)” (2010)
“For seventeen years of his life, the whereabouts of the medieval Italian poet Dante Alighieri is unknown to modern scholars. All we know is that during this time, he traveled as an exile across Europe, while working on his epic poem, The Divine Comedy. In his masterpiece he describes a journey through the three realms of the afterlife. The volume describing hell, Inferno, is the most famous of the the three.
Valley of the Dead is the real story behind Inferno. In his wanderings, Dante stumbles on a zombie infestation, and the things he sees there–people being devoured, burned alive, boiled in pitch, torn apart by dogs, eviscerated, impaled, crucified, etc.–become the basis of all the horrors he describes in Inferno. Afraid to be labeled a madman, Dante made the terrors he witnessed into a more ‘believable’ account of an otherworldly adventure with demons and mythological monsters, but now the real story can finally be told.” [. . .] —Author Bob Freeman
Contributed by Kim Paffenroth
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