Book review:
Dan Brown’s Inferno
It’s been
four years now since our last encounter with Robert Langdon, the be-tweeded
hero who has Da Vinci’d and Demon-ed his way through three previous Dan Brown
page-rippers.
Brown’s last
book, “The Lost
Symbol,” came out in 2009, smack in the vortex of a Brownado
— a whirling era of “Da Vinci Code” European tour packages and Tom Hanks’s
second cinematic turn as the lank-haired Harvard symbologist. “The Lost Symbol”
seemed of the moment and of particularly heightened American interest, set as
it was in D.C.
Tuesday marks
the release of “Inferno,”
Brown’s newest Langdon installment. One is still excited — one must be;
Doubleday is printing a whopping 4 million copies — but the anticipation
feels different. At this point, it’s already clear what Brown can do with the
genre. He has perfected the breathless art of the cliffhanger chapter, the ooky
villain, the historish backdrop. His novels are like high-stakes, 500-page
Mad Libs; a reader doesn’t have to worry that it will be a fun ride, just that
the adverbs and proper nouns will line up in a way that honors the art form.
Which brings
me to the surest way readers can tell whether they have landed in a Dan Brown
novel: A character is dying — a wizened character who is the sole possessor of
a crucial piece of knowledge. Rather than using the last minutes of his life to
scrawl, “The [IMPORTANT OBJECT] is in the [SPECIFIC LOCATION]” on a crumpled
napkin, he uses them to concoct an artsy, esoteric scavenger hunt through a
foreign city.
The city in
“Inferno” is Florence, where a hospitalized Langdon has awoken with a head
wound that leaves him unable to recall how or why he arrived in Italy.
Fortunately, his fetching doctor, Sienna — a former child prodigy with an
absurd IQ — is willing to sling him on the back of her moped and help him
figure it out: retracing his pre-amnesia steps and learning how Dante’s “Divine Comedy”
can aid them in foiling the posthumous plot of an evil genius. Discovered in
Langdon’s rumpled clothes, see, is a small projector that displays a pictorial
rendition of Dante’s vision of Hell.
Meanwhile,
three competing entities nip at their heels: an enigmatic female punk assassin,
an enigmatic researcher with the World Health Organization and an enigmatic
businessman who runs an organization called The Consortium — an
MI6/CIA/Blackwater hybrid that specializes in doing complicated things for rich
people.
“Fact,” Brown
writes in the book’s short preface: “All artwork, literature, science, and
historical references in this novel are real.”
But that
can’t be right, can it? Not when a simple Wikipedia search tells me that one of
the important artifacts is believed to be a reproduction, not the real thing
the reader is led to think it is. The Consortium is real, too, Brown writes —
and it might be, but would such an organization really have its headquarters
in a giant yacht floating around in the Adriatic Sea?
No matter. As
with Brown’s other works, it’s more fun to read “Inferno” when you accept that
every whoa-ful tidbit is true. Brown is at his best when he makes readers
believe that dusty books and musty passageways are just covers for ancient
global conspiracies. There is plenty of that in “Inferno” — at one point
Langdon laments that he hasn’t seen Michelangelo’s “David” yet on this trip,
but the reader would hardly notice. It feels like we’ve seen everything else in
the city, at a brisk, engaging clip.
Unfortunately,
at other times the book’s musty passageways seem to be not so much holding
history up as sagging under its weight. Narration appears lifted from a Fodor’s
guide, as when Langdon pauses in the middle of a life-or-death escape to
remember the history of a bridge: “Today the vendors are mostly goldsmiths and
jewelers, but that has not always been the case. Originally the bridge had been
home to Florence’s vast, open-air market, but the butchers were banished in
1593.” It’s like trying to solve a mystery while one of those self-guided tour
headsets is dangling from your ears. (Step over this prone body and press 32 to
learn more about the velvet box containing Dante’s death mask in the Palazzo
Vecchio.)
Ironically,
one of the more compelling mysteries in “Inferno” doesn’t have to do with art
history, but with science future — with very real questions about the
population explosion and humanity’s responsibility for the Earth. It would have
been interesting to see those questions wrestled with more, but that kind of
novel would probably take place at a sterile public health conference, not in a
series of cobblestoned Italian streets. It definitely wouldn’t star Robert
Langdon.
And what about
Robert Langdon? I’ll confess that I love Robert Langdon. In this, in “The Da
Vinci Code,” in anything. He’s a windbag, he’s pretentious, he talks too much
about his tailored British suits, but he maintains respectful, mostly platonic
relationships with a series of brilliant, intimidating women.
Read
“Inferno” to learn a bunch of “Divine Comedy” trivia, sure, or to watch a smart
man make wild deductions based on Renaissance symbology. But also notice that
when it comes time to flee for his life, the smart man lets the lady drive.
1 – Utilizando a técnica de leitura conhecida como scanning, encontre, no texto, os trechos
aos quais as palavras ou frases abaixo fazem referência.
a) 2009
b) 4 million
c) Florence
d) Sienna
e) The Consortium
f) 1593
2 – As definições abaixo são de palavras encontradas no
texto. Analise-as e, em seguida, encontre no texto as palavras correspondentes.
a)
____________________ - noun
a
melodramatic adventure serial in which each installment ends in suspense in
order to interest the reader or viewer in the next installment
b)
____________________ - adjective
wrinkled with
age
c)
____________________ - noun
a pleasing
bit of anything, such as information, news or gossip
d) ____________________
- adjective
an empty,
pretentious talker
Nenhum comentário:
Postar um comentário