The Dante Club

Matthew Pearl

The Dante Club

The Dante Club is a work of fiction. Many of the characters are inspired by historical figures; others are entirely imaginary creations of the author. Apart from the historical figures any resemblance between these fictional characters and actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

To Lino, my professor, and Ian, my teacher

Caution to the Reader

Pittsfield Daily Reporter, “Community Notebook,” September 15, 1989

Search teams safely recovered Ke

Entomologist Dr. K. L. Landsman of the Harve-Bay Institute Museum in Boston reports that the blowfly samples retrieved from the site are historically unknown to Massachusetts. More noteworthy, says Landsman, the insects and their larvae appear to represent a species that has been thought completely extinct by entomologists for nearly fifty years. Cochliomyia hominivorax, known commonly as the New World primary screwworm, was classified in 1859 by a French doctor on a South American island. By the end of the 19th century the presence of this dangerous species grew to epidemic levels, causing the deaths of hundreds of thousands of livestock throughout the Western Hemisphere and reportedly some human beings. During the 1950s, a massive American-engineered program successfully eradicated the species by introducing gamma-radiated sterile male flies into the population, ending the ability of the female flies to reproduce.

Ke

You may wonder, referring back to the title page of this volume, how the above article could possibly relate to Dante, but you will see shortly that the co

The text of Mr. Pearl’s work derives from the true origins of Dante’s presence in our culture. In 1867, the poet H. W. Longfellow completed the first American translation of The Divine Comedy, Dante’s revolutionary poem of the hereafter. Presently, there exist more translations of Dante’s poetry into English than into any other language, and the United States produces more Dante translations than any other country. The Dante Society of America, of Cambridge, Massachusetts, boasts itself the oldest continuous organization in the world dedicated to the study and promotion of Dante. As T. S. Eliot remarked, Dante and Shakespeare divide the modern world between them; and Dante’s half of the world enlarges every year. Before Longfellow’s work, however, Dante remained all but an unknown entity here. We did not speak the language of Italian, nor did we teach it with any frequency; we did not travel abroad in any significant numbers, nor were there more than a sparse handful of Italians living in the entire United States.

Under the full force of my critical acumen, I found that beyond these essential facts, the extraordinary events narrated by The Dante Club advanced fable rather than history. However, searching the databases of Lexis-Nexis for confirmation of my appraisal, I discovered the startling newspaper notice, inserted above, from the Pittsfield Daily Reporter. Immediately contacting Dr. Landsman of the Harve-Bay Institute, I pieced together a fuller picture of the incident that occurred nearly fourteen years ago.

Ke

The reawakened species of fly, exhibiting a previously unreported capability to survive across climates, has been introduced since then to the Middle East, apparently through cargo shipments, and, as I write, decimates the livestock and economy of northern Iran. It has lately been theorized from scientific findings printed in last year’s Abstracts of Entomology that the divergent evolution exhibited by the flies originated in the northeastern United States circa 1865.

To the question of how it began there was no apparent answer—except, I now brokenheartedly believe, within the details of The Dante Club. For more than five weeks now, I have assigned the task of additional examination of Pearl’s manuscript to eight of the fourteen teaching fellows in my employment this semester. They have analyzed and cataloged the philological and historiographical precepts line by line, noting with flickering interest the minor mistakes that are the fault only of the author’s ego. With each passing day, we witness a bit more evidence of the remarkable gloom and glory encountered by Longfellow and his protectors the year Dante turned six hundred. I have waived any recompensation, for this was no longer a preface I set out to write but a warning. Ke

Professor C. Lewis Watkins Cambridge, Massachusetts