Dan Brown: Di yu (Chinese language, 2013, Shi bao wen hua chu ban qi ye gu fen you xian gong si)
511 pages
Chinese language
Published Aug. 6, 2013 by Shi bao wen hua chu ban qi ye gu fen you xian gong si.
In his international blockbusters The Da Vinci Code, Angels & Demons, and The Lost Symbol, Dan Brown masterfully fused history, art, codes, and symbols. In this riveting new thriller, Brown returns to his element and has crafted his highest-stakes novel to date.
In the heart of Italy, Harvard professor of symbology, Robert Langdon, is drawn into a harrowing world centered on one of history’s most enduring and mysterious literary masterpieces . . . Dante’s Inferno.
Against this backdrop, Langdon battles a chilling adversary and grapples with an ingenious riddle that pulls him into a landscape of classic art, secret passageways, and futuristic science. Drawing from Dante’s dark epic poem, Langdon races to find answers and decide whom to trust . . . before the world is irrevocably altered.
Content warning The Plot
If I had a nickel for every time I consumed media about a virus which makes part of the human population sterile to save the world, I'd have two nickels. Watch the show Utopia. It's on Amazon Prime. Don't watch the third season because it's a bad reboot.
A fast paced mystery through the streets of Italy. Dan Brown is a writer who knows how to keep up suspense and weave strands of ancient religious elements into the tapestry of his stories. Not a masterpiece but an enjoyable thriller.
Let's dispense with the "This is crap literature!" crowd right away: you won't like me or what I write.
Dan Brown did, with "The DaVinci Code", create a mystery based around old symbols and myths, meshed together in what was quite a fun "little" book. There's nothing to be gained what so ever from claiming "It's not true!". No, it isn't. It's fantasy, and it was well done.
"Inferno", on the other hand, is simply one more of the same. Nothing wrong with that, but the mystery isn't mysterious any more, even tho the symbols are as complex and the clues as obscure. It is one, long list of complex and obscure.
The problem - the very REAL problem - for me was the philosophical claptrap. You might want to avoid the next paragraph.
Highly intelligent people. They suffer so much. Schools bore them; society wish to imprison them in …
Let's dispense with the "This is crap literature!" crowd right away: you won't like me or what I write.
Dan Brown did, with "The DaVinci Code", create a mystery based around old symbols and myths, meshed together in what was quite a fun "little" book. There's nothing to be gained what so ever from claiming "It's not true!". No, it isn't. It's fantasy, and it was well done.
"Inferno", on the other hand, is simply one more of the same. Nothing wrong with that, but the mystery isn't mysterious any more, even tho the symbols are as complex and the clues as obscure. It is one, long list of complex and obscure.
The problem - the very REAL problem - for me was the philosophical claptrap. You might want to avoid the next paragraph.
Highly intelligent people. They suffer so much. Schools bore them; society wish to imprison them in politically correct muck. Society even HATE them for being, well, smart, and good with math.
Not really. We don't understand "intelligence", and we don't really hate those who think differently - unless, of course, they are artists. Could someone explain why a darned clever person would let ANYTHING bore her?
Rant over - but "Inferno" contains two supremely intelligent people; so intelligent that they have insights the rest of us cannot fathom, and since we cannot fathom how RIGHT they are, they have to act without asking. Paraphrased: "Would you in cold blood murder an innocent child to save another innocent child?". The big, moral question of the book. Added to a mix of Transhumanism (that's the "movement that epitomizes the most daring, courageous, imaginative, and idealistic aspirations of humanity" to quote one of them. The rest of us don't have daring, courageous etc aspirations), evolution, politics on the right hand side of things, and some truly FLAT characters .... no. Sorry, Dan. It's soup, and it isn't even very tasty.
But mainly it bother me that the book could have been split in two: one travel handbook for the symbolically inclined; one, thin, very thin, mystery.
