A review by ellie_bronte
The Inferno by Dante Alighieri

5.0

I'm not going to lie and say I understood the book the first time I read it because I didn't. I really had to go through the book and reread some parts... well most of the parts in order to get what was really going on. Oh and the summaries of each chapter in my copy of The Inferno really helped me out! Despite the difficulty of the language though, I absolutely loved it. Every part of it. The idea that a man could sit down and write about the layout of a place that mankind could never fathom is amazing, and yet it seems so real! Where people ended up, the irony of their punishments... And yet why would he create the layout that way? It gripped me how that one woman in the Circle of Lust was forever trapped there despite a single slip up with another man. Just like if a Hell really does exist, I'll never really understand why in cases like those although they seemed clear cut to Dante Alighieri.

Also, I wouldn't have thought that a topic so demented like Hell could be written in such a beautiful way. Beautiful but scary of course... The way that Dante looses his way in both a symbolic and literal sense and descends through the layers of Hell in order to find the light... The book is just overflowing with symbols! I loved it so much I just had to reread it to understand it fully... and again... and again...