Dante in Love: The World's Greatest Poem and How It Made History

I just read this book for the second time, and I am more amazed and grateful than ever! Thank you Harriet Rubin! This is not just someone explaining the life and writings of a famous author. This is someone showing you how the beautiful insights of a genius can inspire and guide you in ways that will bring light and joy into your own life. Oh, if have any slight inclination to get this book, I suggest you do it.

This book reminds me of Brunelleschi's Dome, a book I loved. Brunelleschi built the "impossible" Duomo in Florence, and Dante's poem which springs from the same Florentine soil, is as significant an achievement, if not more so; Dante freed the literary world from florid Latinisms; he wrote a poem that is meant to read us: to make sense of our own griefs and ambitions. Scholars insist that Dante was born a genius, but Rubin makes a compelling case for the fact that he taught himself to create a masterpiece. Dante in Love is a first-class piece of literary sleuthing. I understand that Rubin was once a book editor, and my guess is that she tried to fathom Dante's creativity as she must have tried to understand her authors'.

For anyone who sees the world as literally divided between long swigs of hell and glimmering moments of paradise, Dante in Love makes it very clear how to move between them. Trounced by love? Eaten alive by a boss or the system? The important thing is to get out of hell. Not so easy, but the great Italian poet Dante figured out a system for escape. Our job is to figure out Dante's system and this Rubin has done expertly and invitingly. She makes Dante's poem into a map to follow. One comes to understand the great poet's gift not just for achieving a love you can't lose. Dante's map also leads you to states of creative fulfillment. As Rubin makes clear in her book, Dante's journey from Hell to Paradise turned an all time-looser--yes, that's what Dante was for half his life--into the great poet we are dosed with in college, at too young and unripe an age in which to get what we need from his book. I'm recommending Dante in Love to everyone I love. Let the others swirl in hell.

Ms. Rubin's writing is as lyrical as her subject matter. You won't be disappointed!

Dante, it seems, does not have to be inpenetrable to the modern reader. Harriet Rubin is one's own Virgil as she guides the reader through the life and times of Dante, providing invaluable context for an appreciation of one of the world's great literary masterpieces. The reader must rethink all assumptions about language, love and God, as the medieval concepts of all are so different than our own. Rubin uses the Comedy as a way to explore concepts of each that have been almost forgotten in the centuries since Dante produced his masterpiece. And as she explains the political and religious landscapes of his era, she portrays a very human Dante, one who chooses to turn a bitter exile into a brilliant achievement, and who finally will search out--and find--the true meaning of Love.