Matthew Pearl's The Dante Club
This is so good! I was not expecting it to be so intelligent. This time period is usually a horribly boring black hole for me but somehow Pearl has made it interesting. Maybe its the pedestal literature and language are placed upon... I want to look up how much is fiction. I'm going to wait until I'm done with the book though so I don't ruin anything for myself. Whatever the reason is though, I like it. Here are a few excerpts I marked:
"[he] had once spent an entire year condicting all his personal and business affairs in Latin.... The living languages, as they were called by the Harvard fellows, were little more than cheap imitations [of Latin], low distortions, Italians, like Spanish and German, particularly represented the loose political passions, bodily appetites, and absent morals of decadent Europe. Dr. Manning had no intention of allowing foreign posions [modern languages] to be spread under the disguise of literature." (pg. 22-23)
^ a little on the extreme but I like the passion for the classics...
"You have a larger duty to the world and to yourself than any mere spectator! I shan't hear a bit of your hesitancy! I wouldn't know what Dante is to save my soul. But a genius the likes of you, my dear friend, assumes a divine responsibility to fight for all those exiled from the world." (pg. 33)
^ a friend corrects Lowell after Lowell begins to doubt the value of his academic career over an industrial career
"The proof of poetry was... that it reduced to the essence of a single line the vague philosophy that floated in all men's minds, so as to render it portable and useful, ready to the hand." (pg. 34)
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