L’inferno- Dante  (1321) 
Continuing through the inferno, this month Cantos 23-32. 

Canto 23 
Eighth circle- fifth ditch: Fraudulent/bribe takers 
Virgil and Dante escape the demon bunch that was sent to accompany them, and do them harm… 
The demons come after them, but the pair are able to escape the ditch and get safely enough to the next. 
Eighth circle- sixth ditch: Fraudulent/hypocrites 
In this section the condemned are swathed in immensely heavy golden robes, that are made of lead on the inside. They meet Catalano and Caiaphas.  

Canto 24 
Eighth circle- seventh ditch: Fraudulent/thieves 
This ditch has the condemned naked and running away from a huge number and variety of serpents. One condemned is caught, bitten, and burns to ashes, only to be put together again and start the process over. They meet one Vanni Fucci, who stole sacred objects from a church, and let the blame fall on others. At the end of the canto, he gives a negative prophecy over Dante just out of spite. 

Canto 25 
Eighth circle- seventh ditch: Fraudulent/thieves, cont. 
Fucci levels some rude gestures towards God and is immediately squelched by some snakes. Then a centaur comes after him to torture him some more. Then Dante gives an example of metamorphosis. A serpent launching itself onto a man, then they meld into each other. Then another serpent bites into the creature and they slowly transform, the serpent into a man, and the man into a serpent. So it seems the serpents in the ditch aren’t demons… they are other condemned that inflict punishment, then are transformed into the ones to be inflicted, in a nasty circle. 

Canto 26 
Eighth circle- eighth ditch: Fraudulent/evil counselors 
Dante starts off lambasting Florence for being such a den of iniquity. From the ridge of the ditch, he sees what look like a bunch of fireflies. As he approaches, they are flames each containing the condemned. One is Ulysses, who Dante begs Virgil to converse with. Ulysses tells of how he convinced his band of men to sail past the Strait of Gibraltar in search of knowledge of human vice and wisdom. They sail south down the coast of Africa and eventually come to the mountain of Purgatory, which they aren’t supposed to see, so God sends a whirlwind and sinks their ship, dragging them all down to hell. 

Canto 27 
Eighth circle- eighth ditch: Fraudulent/evil counselors, cont. 
After Ulysses finishes his speech, another flame comes up- Guido da Montefeltre. Dante gives him a rundown of the current political situation in Romagna, then asks Guido to tell his story, which he does. The TL;DR version is that Guido was a man of arms, who feeling repentant, became a Franciscan friar. But the Pope harangued him into giving him counsel about how to bring down a rival, which Guido did. Despite being promised that he would be absolved, a demon grabs him at death and says one can’t claim repentance, and then willfully commit the sin anyway, that would be breaking the law of non-contradiction. So he was taken down to hell. 

Canto 28 
Eighth circle- ninth ditch: Fraudulent/schismatics 
Dante starts off with a disclaimer that human language can’t really capture the carnage he sees in this canto. If one were to pile up all the bodies of the various amputated and wounded through the long history of wars in south Italy, it wouldn’t measure up to what he saw in the ninth ditch. 
The first he sees is Mohammed, who states that this place is for those who disseminated scandal and schism. The condemned here are ripped open, as they tore apart the societies in which they lived.  
Pier da Medicina is here, Gaius Curio, who told Julius Caesar not to delay crossing the Rubicon, and ushered in the Roman civil war that led to the Empire, and Mosca dei Lamberti, who had sown division in Florence. Finally there is Bertram del Bornio, who had encourage king Henry II to rebel against his father. In the only mention of it in the Inferno, Bertram says his punishment is ‘contrappasso’, or just retribution, the concept that runs throughout the inferno in its portrayal of the various punishments. The punishments are meant to symbolically mirror the sin, so that the sinner has now become what he was in life, with the self-deception stripped away. 

Canto 29 
Eighth circle- tenth ditch: falsifiers/counterfeits 
Here the condemned are either unable to move, or can only move by dragging themselves along, while they suffer from inescapable itches. They scratch their scabbed bodies until they are bloody, but can find no relief. Dante strikes up a conversation with Griffolino, a well-known alchemist, who was burned at the stake. He had told a leader that he could make him fly, and the dummy paid to have him teach him. It of course didn’t work, and the man, bugged at the trick, had Griffolino condemned. But he tells Dante that he was sent down to this ditch for his counterfeiting. Dante rants against the stupidity of the Sienese, which another seconds, excepting for a few particular men he calls out. This turns out to be another counterfeiter- Capocchio.  

Canto 30 
Eighth circle- tenth ditch: falsifiers/counterfeits; cont. 
It turns out there are several variations of falsifiers and punishments. In the previous canto, were the alchemists who were covered with itching scabs. In this canto we have counterfeiters afflicted by dropsy; impersonators with hydrophobia, and perjurers with fever. 

Immediately though, Dante sees two frantic and rabid condemned souls: Gianni Schicchi and Myrrha, running around biting other condemned sinners (these are the hydrophobics). Schicchi impersonated a member of the Donati family to alter a will, and Myrrha impersonated another woman in order to have sexual intercourse with her father. 

Dante finds Master Adamo (dropsy), who counterfeited Florins and was burned at the stake. 
Next to him are Potipher’s wife, and Sinon (fever), who helped dupe the Trojans to take in the horse. 
Adamo and Sinon get into an argument and trade insults, which engrosses Dante, until Virgil threatens to get into a fight with him if he doesn’t knock it off. Dante repents, but Virgil lets him know that enjoying such nonsense is a base desire. 

Canto 31 
Eighth Circle- edge of Ninth Circle 
Dante and Virgil are on the edge of the cliff leading down to the ninth and lowest circle of hell, when Dante notices what look in the distance like towers, but are actually giants, imprisoned on the edge, but tall enough to be seen by the travelers. The ninth circle is for traitors. They first meet Nimrod, the biblical ‘mighty hunter’, who founded the country of Shinar, where the tower of Babel was constructed. Part of his punishment for this rebellion against God is that he can no longer communicate with anyone since he speaks a language that none can understand, nor can he understand anyone else. 

Then they meet the titan Ephialtes. Dante wants to meet Briareus, but Virgil says he is too far away and will not be useful anyway. They will meet Antaeus instead, who’s arms are free, and can get them down to the lowest circle. Virgil convinces Antaeus to do this since Dante is still alive and will return to the earth, where he can write of Antaeus. So the pair are conveyed down to the bottom of the lowest circle, and there the canto ends. 

Canto 32 
Ninth Circle- region of Caino. Traitors to family. 
The unrepentent sinners here are locked in a thick clear ice up to where their heads start. Dante accidentally kicks one in the head before questioning another- Camiscione de’ Pazzi. I won’t waste time on the details here since none of these are people any of us in the modern era would recognize. 

Ninth Circle- region of Antenora. Traitors to country 
As they travel inwards, Dante “accidentally” kicks another guy in the head, sparking a testy conversation. Dante asks his name, he tells Dante to bug off. Dante says he can spread word up top if he’ll say who he is, the guy says that’s the last thing he wants, bug off again. Dante threatens to start pulling hair out, to which the guy says do your worst, I’ll never tell you anything. So Dante does, which makes the guy howl in pain. Then one of his ‘neighbors’, gives his name away- Bocca degli Abati.  Dante recognizes him and swears he will now write him down in all his disgrace. Bocca then gives away the names of the other guy who outed him, as well as some others too. 

The canto ends with Dante and Virgil coming across a guy eating another’s brains out. We’ll meet him in the next canto. 

Inferno- Sandow Birk 
This isn’t a translation; more of an update, a partial modernization. The writer changes the language into modern American slang, sets the story in LA, and adds a few modern names. When I heard about it I thought it might be interesting. It retains many of the original names, with most of the in-depth stories Dante included left intact. The modern names are simply appended to the list of evil-doers. He includes updated pictures, which is where we can see that it’s set in LA, much more than in the text itself. The other modern updates would be in some of the similes, he changes them to be things we can relate to today. It was interesting, but not quite as good as I had hoped.  

The Annals of Imperial Rome- Tacitus  (116AD) 
This portion of Tacitus’ history covers 14 AD with the reign of Tiberius to 68 AD at the end of the reign of Nero. In between Tiberius were Caligula (37-41 AD) and Claudius (41-54 AD). 

Jane Eyre- Charlotte Bronte  
I read through the Marjolein Bastin hardcover edition, which contains supplementary materials and some nice illustrations. I won’t rehash the story since this is the fourth time I’ve read it through. But it continues to be one of my favorite books for a variety of reasons, and I never cease to love it and learn from it. 

Il Conformista- Alberto Moravia (1951) 
Marcello Clerici is a young boy who kills a bunch of lizards, and really liked it. But he is aware that this is not normal. He attempts to convince his friend Roberto to kill some too, which would help him feel that, if others like it too, he must not be abnormal. Robert however is horrified. Marcello then goes in search of convincing himself that he is ‘normal’. At some point though, a bunch of classmates, since Marcello has some effeminate features, pin him down and put a skirt on him. He is rescued by a passing driver, who invites him back to his house. He tells Marcello that he has a revolver, which Marcello really wants. The man, Lino, promises him he will give him the revolver if Marcello comes to the house. While at the house, Lino tries to rape Marcello, who ends up shooting him. Convinced he has murdered the man, Marcello feels guilty, but also finds he isn’t too terribly bothered by having killed him.  

We fast forward 17 years to 1937, where Marcello is now a state agent for fascist Italy. He is about to get married, and even though he doesn’t really love his fiance, but…it is the normal thing to do, and normalcy is what our boy is all about trying to find. In preparation for his wedding, he is supposed to attend confession. While there, he decides to confess his crime. The priest is horrified, but essentially gives him some things to do and he gets married. The fascist state decides that an old professor of Marcello’s has been anti-fascist, so Marcello is sent, on his honeymoon, to Paris to set up the man’s murder. While there he sort of falls for his old professor’s current wife. He attempts to have a fling, but the wife is actually a lesbian, and doesn’t want to have him… but his brand new bride. His bride however is uninterested. In the end, both the professor and his wife are killed by other agents of the state, only to find out that the entire mission had been called off after it was decided that the professor wasn’t actually a threat, but the orders were sent too late.  

As an epilogue, we skip forward to 1943 when the fascist government has fallen, and there is a great fear in Marcello’s wife’s mind that they will be condemned as part of the fascist regime. While out in Rome one evening, Marcello meets Lino, the man who had tried to rape him as a boy, and whom he thought he had killed. Marcello argues that Lino had ruined his life, but Lino retorts that the loss of innocence was inevitable and is merely part of the human experience. 

The next day, as Marcello, his wife and his daughter are driving out to get away from Rome, the car is strafed by a warplane.. It doesn’t say which side. Realizing his wife and child are dead, he awaits the return of the plane and that’s where the book ends. Typical Italian novel: dark to the end. 

The novel is ultimately about ‘normality’. Marcello attempts normality with conformity. 

I and Thou- Martin Buber  (1923) 
Buber was a German Jewish Philosopher. Buber proposes that humans are defined by two word-pairs: I-it, and I-Thou. I-it is about the world of experience and sensation. I-Thou is the world of relationships. Long story short: Relationships are what define us. I’ll leave it at that. 

Waiting for Godot- Samuel Beckett (1953) 
A short, nonsensical play, purportedly about man’s search for meaning… at least that’s what the book cover says.  

Creatures That Once Were Men- Maxim Gorky  (1897) 
“The feeling that one is unable to injure anyone is worse than the feeling that one is unable to do good, because to do harm is far easier and simpler.” 

The quote above is from the story “Creatures that once were men”. The book is some 5-6 short stories.  

Under the Volcano- Malcom Lowry  (1947) 
The book chronicles one day- November 2 1938- the Day of the Dead, following the ex-British consul, Geoffrey Firmin. Firmin is an alcoholic and is wasted the entire book. He thinks in an incoherent stream-of-consciousness that is tough to read, and frankly, just depressing. He lives in the fictional town of Quauhnahuac, basically Cuernavaca, Mexico, under the shadow of the volcanoes Popocatepetl and Ixtaccihuatl, which are constantly referenced… hence the title: Under the Volcano. 

Firmin’s ex-wife Yvonne shows up to try and rescue him from his drunkenness and rekindle their marriage. Complicating the matter is Firmin’s younger brother Hugh, who apparently had an affair with Yvonne a while back. Firmin staggers from bar to bar, with Hugh and Yvonne trying to help, but at times leaving him to himself. It ends when Firmin gets into a fight with the local cops, is shot, and the shot spooks a horse, which runs off and tramples Yvonne to death. They won’t be making this into a hallmark movie.