2019
https://www.librarything.com/topic/312033#6964651 ( )

Questa biografia mi è piaciuta moltissimo. Mai noiosa. ( )

There could hardly be a more fitting biographer for Dante than Pulitzer Prize-winning literary critic Lewis, who has called Dante's native city of Florence his second home for 50 years. In this newest offering in the Penguin Lives series a fraction of the size of Lewis's previous biographies of Edith Wharton and the Jameses Lewis shows an uncanny ability to capture crucial moments in Dante's life and development as an artist. Whether he is presenting the intricacies of Florentine politics or the living woman behind Dante's immortal vision of Beatrice, Lewis manages to provide just enough context to illuminate the known facts of Dante's life without losing the thread of his narrative. Lewis is especially effective in tracing the artist's tormented relationship with his native city, including his banishment from Florence in the political intrigues of the 1300s. In one memorable passage, he describes the "Purgatorio" (in which Dante consigns whole populations of Tuscans to eternal suffering) as the "exile's furious song" an attempt by an all-too-human artist to pass celestial judgment on his malefactors.

Genuine interest and flashs of insight cannot stop this bite sized biography from feeling like an extended, sometimes tedious, college 101 lecture. Professor Lewis, a Bancroft Prize winner, has an academic writing style ill suited for the Penguin Lives series. While I learned little of Dante's life that I did not already know, Lewis did inspire me to look into the two parts of the Comedy besides the Inferno. ( )