Tag: Dante

The Devil’s Detective by Simon Kurt Unsworth

Posted December 5, 2015 by Michael @ Knowledge Lost in Crime, Horror / 0 Comments

Title: The Devil's Detective (Goodreads)
Author: Simon Kurt Unsworth
Published: Del Rey, 2015
Pages: 368
Genres: Horror
My Copy: Library Book

Buy: Amazon, Book Depository, Kindle (or visit your local Indie bookstore)

Thomas Fool is one of the Devil’s Detectives, known as Information Men, his job is to keep order in Hell. When a badly bruised and unidentifiable body is discovered, Fool is given the case. The problem is, this is Hell and everyone is guilty of something. How can he investigate a murder where everything around him screams death? Who will come forward as a witness when everyone has something to hide?

I have been thinking a lot about writing better reviews and I feel like Simon Kurt Unsworth has made that job a whole lot easier with The Devil’s Detective. Before reading this book I had most of the themes worked out in my head. So let us start with the basic; a mystery novel is typically a quest narrative. We have the detective that is the hero of the story, setting out to solve a mystery. We know what the mystery is from the back of the novel but then again there always is something more going on.

If you think of the detective as the hero, it is easy to think a white knight on a journey to bring justice to the world. Although can this really be a morality tale? This is set in hell and if we go by the depiction of hell found in the Bible or Dante’s Inferno, it is one of hopelessness and despair. Assuming Unsworth is going to try to keep to the traditional narrative structures and also keep the Christian theology we can illuminate some core character traits.

There will be no true justice, Thomas Fool will not be a savour figure; he might solve the crime but they are still in Hell. Justice in Hell, seems unlikely. Now the idea of the detective being called an Information Man, leads me to think he will have knowledge of what goes on in Hell, but can he change anything? Considering the location this is unlikely, I do believe he will never effect the social balance, there will be no change and no real justice. If you do not believe me, consider his name, Fool.

I went into The Devil’s Detective with these preconceived thoughts, and turns out I was correct in thinking this way. I did not expect anything special, this novel was a light read; blending horror with a typical mystery plot. I wish I could say I enjoyed the book but I did not, there were no surprises and nothing stood out. I do think the theology was a little off and Unsworth’s depiction of Hell really needed work. If you want to read something set in Hell, I recommend Inferno; it has some of the best descriptions of what Hell might be like. Obviously we cannot be sure but it really does capture the despair and pain they we often associate with Hell.

In the First Circle by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Posted January 9, 2015 by Michael @ Knowledge Lost in Classic / 0 Comments

Title: In the First Circle (Goodreads)
Author: Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Translator: Harry Willets
Published: Harper Perennial, 1968
Pages: 784
Genres: Classic
My Copy: Paperback

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Moscow, Christmas Eve 1949; a man makes a phone call to the American embassy to warn them about the Soviet Atom Bomb project. This call was caught on tape and quickly disconnected by The People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs (NKVD). A brilliant mathematician named Gleb Nerzhin, was taken as a sharashka (known as zeks) prisoner and ordered to help track down the mystery caller. The zeks know that they have it better than a “regular” gulag prisoners but they are faced with the moral dilemma; to aid a political system they oppose or be transferred to the deadly labour camps.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn is a Russian author as well as a historian; he was also a critic of Soviet totalitarianism which found himself in prison much like Gleb Nerzhin. He was accused of anti-revolutionary propaganda under Russian SFSR Penal Code (Article 58 paragraph 10) which is a ‘catch-all’ criminal offence that could be used against anyone that might threaten the government. During the period of Stalinism, the crime of “propaganda and agitation that called to overturn or undermining of the Soviet power” jumped from a six month prison sentence to seven years of imprisonment, with possible internal exile for two to five years. On 7 July 1945, Solzhenitsyn was sentenced to seven years in a labour camp for comments he made in private letters to a friend. After his sentence ended, Solzhenitsyn was then internally exiled for life at Kok-Terek, which is in the north-eastern region of Kazakhstan.

The First Circle was self-censored before Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn even attempted to get it published in 1968. Originally the book was 96 chapters long but the censorship turned the novel into 87 chapters. Some changes included the man telling another doctor to share some new medicine with the French instead of warning the Americans about the atom bomb. All mention of the Roman Catholics and religion was also removed. It wasn’t till 2009 a new English translation (not sure of the details on the Russian editions) saw the book restored and uncensored; now with the title In The First Circle.

The title alone is fascinating and it allows the reader to pick up on the whole metaphor before starting the novel. Looking at Dante’s Inferno, it is easy to find that the first circle of hell is limbo. In the epic poem Virgil introduces Dante to people like Socrates, Plato, Homer, Horace and Ovid. The time between Jesus’ crucifixion and resurrection is often referred to as the Harrowing of Hell, in which he descended into limbo and brought salvation to the righteous. However in Dante’s Inferno this meant that Christ saved people like Noah, Moses, Abraham and King David, but a lot of the intellectuals where left. This is metaphor for the penal institutions, making reference to all the intellectuals and political thinkers arrested under Stalin’s Russia.

This novel made me feel a lot smarter than I actually am, there is a lot of information within In The First Circle however Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn presented them in accessible way. Going into the book I knew a little about Solzhenitsyn’s life and the metaphor in the title was explained in the Goodreads synopsis. So I was able to witness how everything came together without doing any research. The book sometimes goes into Russian history; I was fascinated with everything I learnt.

I have read so many books set in Cold War Russia but I don’t think there have been many actually written by a Russian. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn has lead an interesting life and I am keen to read more of his novels before attempting The Gulag Archipelago, his three volume book on the history of a gulag labour camp. If you have paid attention to my best of 2014 list you would have noticed that In The First Circle did make the list. This was a wonderful book that was both thrilling and educational, I would recommend it to anyone interested in Russian history, especially the Cold War era.

The Circle by Dave Eggers

Posted October 17, 2014 by Michael @ Knowledge Lost in Dystopia / 0 Comments

Title: The Circle (Goodreads)
Author: Dave Eggers
Published: Hamish Hamilton, 2013
Pages: 491
Genres: Dystopia
My Copy: Library Book

Buy: Amazon, Book Depository, Kindle (or visit your local Indie bookstore)

If Facebook and Google were to get married, The Circle would be their direct result of their procreation. The Circle takes the social aspects (and lack of privacy) of Facebook and combines it with the innovation of Google to create a dominant social media platform. Their success was a result of TruYou, a tool that requires people to use their real identity to sign up (including their social security number making it impossible for anyone outside of the US to sign up), many web based companies jumped on board with this innovation, wanting direct access to real data. The effect of TruYou saw the end of internet trolling, identity theft and so much more.

Mae Holland is a woman in her early 20’s that has just landed a job with the Circle thanks to her friend Annie. While she has to start in Customer Experience, a place well below her qualifications the idea of working at the Circle was enough for her. The offices (or campus) of the Circle mimic that of Google, and Mae founds that this is the place to work; everyone is friendly and she will be on the fast track to a promotion in no time. However the Circle; while it demands transparency (hiding nothing from the public) in everything they do, their attempt to close the circle (their mission statement) will result in complete control over everything. Secrets Are Lies, Privacy Is Theft.

Let’s face it, Dave Eggers’ The Circle is less of a social satire and more a horrifying prophecy of the direction social media is going. They days where people can be a curator of their lives online are fast ending and every part of our lives will be accessible. This may have some positive effects in life but when one company or person has too much power, human rights tend to take a back seat. Do people see this? Are they aware just how much of their information is being shared or sold? The Circle forces the readers to ask these questions and take a deeper look what is happening online.

The Circle serves more as a motif; even a homage to Dante if you will. Dave Eggers is the Virgil of this story and both Mae and the readers travel deeper into the circles of hell. Mae learns just much of a tyrant the Circle is, while the reader has a look at social media. While I see this as a homage to Inferno, this totalitarian nightmare is obviously influenced by Nineteen Eighty-Four (as most dystopian novel are) more than anything else. Eggers, like Orwell wants to look at society and see the direction we are heading.

The Circle is headed by the “Three Wise Men” each of them with their own ideas for the direction of the company. These three men seem to be modelled after real life innovators; Mark Zuckerberg, Steve Jobs and Julian Assange. I’m not going to go into the effects three big personalities would have on a company, but I’m sure you can imagine. I’m not going to go too much further into the plot or themes but with a company slogan like “All that happens must be known”, I probably don’t need to spell it out.

This is my first Dave Eggers novel and I’ve often heard that this is one of his weaker novels, however I think this was a perfect place to start for me. I found this dystopian satire to be directly influenced by the works of Jonathan Swift and George Orwell. I have no idea what Eggers other novels are like but I’m convinced to read more; even if they are not social satires. I loved how he incorporated pop-culture into the novel but I worry that this will mean it won’t age well, so you might want to pick this one up soon.

I have been reading novels that critique society but the majority have been classics, so it is nice to step into a modern day setting and see how the age of high-tech innovation and technoconsumerism could be harmful. I see some mixed reactions to this novel and I can understand that, my only hope is that people are understanding satire and are not marking it down for that. Of course I am a big fan of satire and will always be preaching about its value within literature. I found The Circle to be a very impressive novel and it did a great job at critiquing society, I hope people will give it a chance but I suspect this book will be a popular pick. I would like to do this one as part of a book club.

Spirituality and The Arts

Posted May 21, 2010 by Michael @ Knowledge Lost in Culture / 0 Comments

I just read an article from Time-Online called ‘The Spiritual History of English’, which talks about a book by Andrew Thornton-Norris of the same name. The book bases its arguments on the T.S Eliot’s premise that “culture of a people as an incarnation of its religion”. According to Thornton-Norris, literature is the result of liberalism in politics. He also claimed that previously “tradition prevented art or the individual – and relativism in belief” and as for modern art “Now almost every word that is written is a manifesto, a statement, a theology or anti-theology, rather than an unselfconscious work of art, a contribution to the tradition or communal enterprise, as it was in the Latin Classical tradition.”

I know spirituality has played a huge part in the Arts (eg. Caravaggio or any painter back then, John Milton’s Paradise Lost and Dante’s Divine Comedy) in the past but does it play much of a part now?

The Layers of Hell

Posted March 2, 2010 by Michael @ Knowledge Lost in Culture / 0 Comments

I was playing a game on Xbox called Dante’s Inferno, when I got to the 8th layer of hell….hang on a second I was under the impression there was only seven layers. So after a bit of research, I realised that I was wrong, there really are nine layers of hell (according to the epic poem Inferno by Dante).

This led me to ask a few people ‘how many layers of hell are there.’ Consistently I got the answer seven. So why do people think there are only seven layers and not nine like in Dante’s Inferno?

The only explanation that seemed plausible is the fact that there are seven deadly sins, one layer for each sin.

If you know of any other reasons please let me know.