Meeting Dante book cover
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Hardcopy Book: £10.50
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Read reviews of Meeting Dante by Malcolm Guite (Anglican priest, poet, scholar and singer-songwriter; teacher and lecturer at Cambridge University) and Paul Stubbs (poet).
On a journey to Italy, Ingrid Soren glimpsed a face on a fresco in a medieval church. This encounter was to change her life. The man with the long nose was Dante. Assuming him to be highbrow, difficult and obscure, she picked up a long-forgotten copy of The Divine Comedy off her bookshelves at home, and discovered to her surprise a voice that was immediate, accessible, and of great beauty. She was amazed at how contemporary and human Dante is, and how acute his insights into the human psyche.
She decided to follow him through the cities he lived in during the nineteen years of exile while writing the ‘poem of the cosmos’. She started to explore his world, his life-story, something about his character, and the drama of his great poem: above all, the story of his search for Beatrice, and his conviction that we work out our spiritual destiny through human love.
MEETING DANTE is a multi-layered book: travelogue, biography, history, literary appreciation and a portrait of the times in which Dante lived. It is a reflection on the many varieties of love and fortune through the lens of a personal story of love and betrayal. Describing some of Italy’s loveliest medieval architecture, sculpture and painting, Soren unfolds the narrative of Dante’s love for Beatrice in a journey that, she discovers as she travels alongside Dante, is not just his, but hers but Everyman’s.
From Paul Stubbs review: To write this intricately beautiful book, Ingrid Soren traipsed the pathways of Italy that Dante himself took, seeking out those imaginative clefts and fissures of Florence and beyond which Dante’s voice carved, until finding the image of Dante’s death-mask upon a fresco in a medieval church; there, Ingrid Soren lifted this face as if a mask to her own to see the poem through his eyes.
From Malcolm Guite's review: a real page turner ... Over the course of the book she tells the story of the poem itself, tracing for us the compelling, eerie, horrifying but often beautiful and luminous journey of Dante and Virgil through the realms of Hell and Purgatory, and then the transcendent journey of Dante and Beatrice, reunited, up through the spheres of Heaven. ... Though this is a unique book, the reading experience it most reminds me of is my first reading of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.
Comments from readers:
This book is a dazzling tour de force on love, human and divine, and on one of the oldest stories in the world: betrayal.
A lovely ‘small’ book that could become a big one, exquisite and singular a wonderful little book, perfectly executed. It is different.
A lovely piece of work: this book matters. Thank you for making Dante NEW.
Terrific writing, thoughtful, literary and unconventional. This original book is scholarly without being academic, is beautifully described and a compulsive read.