A Review of Dan Brown's Inferno

            First of all, my instinct is to apologize for the blog that has lain dormant for a year. I must however shush that instinct, because truth be told, I am not at all remorseful that I didn’t write over the year. I simply couldn’t have. I was working very hard on completeing my Master of Arts in English, while holding up not one, but two jobs. I just wrapped up my final paper in August, and almost immediately after left for a wonderful (but whirlwind) trip to Ireland for two weeks. Since I’ve been back, I’ve been recovering from a touch of burn out… which has brought me to writing for you, at this present moment. I’ve sorely missed writing, even though its only been a few weeks.
             You see, as part of my recovery, I took a little vacation from writing, and even from reading. I started with… I am deeply ashamed to say this… deep breath… tabloids. Pictures and short shallow blurbs were the only things that seemed salient to be all my exhausted and ADD addled brain in the airports to and from Ireland.
             Next I moved on to various more content focused magazines. One that have I particularly enjoyed is ELLE. I am not at all even remotely claiming to be a fashionista; most of the fashion content goes right over my head. They do however have an excellent selection of journalistic articles and reviews of a variety of subjects, books, and films. Such articles were good reads, but did not involve the long term commitment of a novel or a book (oh the drama… alas, this is how tired I was.)
             My next, most recent step has been to move on to a book. I’m proud to announce that I’m back to real big kid books, complete with stories featuring developed plots. I am not so proud to announce the book I chose for my return is Dan Brown’s Inferno, which was in a word, wretched.
             I did not begin this book expecting epic plot, nuanced characters, or even beautiful prose, but I did expect that I would have had some sort of plot progression. Instead, I endured Inferno’s pointless plot and Brown’s worst, most dry writing to date. And yes, finishing this book was an act of endurance.
             To quickly gloss this book for those who are (blissfully) unaware, Inferno is Dan Brown’s latest installation into the adventures of Robert Langdon (of DaVinci Code fame). The beginning of the book had me hooked: Langdon wakes up in a hospital and cannot remember any recent events, or where he is; a deranged scientist simultaneously threatens to release a dangerous virus.
             In typical Dan Brown fashion, Robert Langdon’s adventure begins at the intersection of science of religion, dealing with overpopulation, scientific interventions and their redundancy due to the Catholic Church’s intervention. From the get go, the issue of overpopulation, while terrifying, does not create the immediate intrigue in the audience when compared to the wild conspiracy theories featured in Brown’s other novels.
             I will admit that there was a twist that I did not see coming, and for good reason. Brown essentially renders his entire plot moot on multiple occasions. The book ends up being literally pointless.
             As for the writing: Dan Brown has never been Ondaatje when it comes to the poetry of prose, but Inferno was a new low. Much of the close readings of art that I do enjoy in Brown’s other books is missing here. Brown also missed many opportunities to create symbols: going to great lengths to set opportunities up, only to leave them dangling (a great mystery considering the book is about a symbologist). I typically enjoy the descriptions of Langdon’s travel adventures, being an aficionado of travel myself, but honestly… My lonely planet travel guide to Florence read more elegantly than parts of Inferno. Brown focused on bland and pointless details, shifting focus from the already lacking plot. There is also no character development, meaning there was no reader investment into any character, an integral function that was missing. If none of the action has any consequence because the reader doesn’t care about the characters, where does that leave an action novel? Collecting dust on the shelf.

Did you read Inferno? If so, what did you think? Has anyone had a good read lately? I’d love to hear any recommendations in the comments!

Eating, Drinking, and Loving Italy

My partner is obsessed with Italian food. He worked in an Italian restaurant, and even though there is a tendency to fall out of love with things you work with all the time, I think this must have just reinforced his passion. Sometimes I wonder if he is with me because of my Italian grandmothers cooking. He says its just a perk, but I wonder… He is truly in culinary heaven in Italy.
             Our tour of Italian cuisine started in Florence. We had some incredible pasta and pizza, and our hostel had great meals (3 portions of rice and a full small chicken for 7 euro!) on the cheap. The real prize of Florence cuisine for me was the wine. Particularly, Chianti. The first time we had it, it was a warm night on the patio, which I have already stated already makes everything taste better. Although we had a red wine, it was chilled, which made it refreshing after a hot day. Sometimes after you walk 30 kms in a day, you just want something cold to drink, and since I don’t drink beer, wine doesn’t really fit the bill for me either. But this Chianti certainly did. It had a full flavour, but was very light. Definitely have a new favourite wine. I can’t bring the Tuscan hills home with me, but hopefully every time I drink Chianti it will be a nice reminder.   
             The next stop on our Italian itinerary was in Rome, which was sort of underwhelming in terms of food. More expensive for less quantity. After two subpar dinners around the tourist areas, we decided to follow the locals across the river to Trastavere. Here we found a slight decrease in the expense and a definite increase in the quantity of the food. We found many family owned restaurants right near the river and sat on the patio, because I have to sit on the patio unless its cold or raining. For drinks, we made our way to Campo di Fiori, a short walk from Piazza Navona. In the mornings, Campo di Fiori is a square that is filled with market stalls. In the early afternoons, all the stalls are cleaned up and tucked away, and the square turns into a giant open air pub. On our last night, we went for dinner with our two flat mates from Rome at a favourite place of theirs called Cesars very close to ruins. It was a family owned place, and our flatmates had become regulars throughout their stay in Rome. We had bruschetta, pasta, panna cotta and tiramisu for 12 euro per person! We also indulged in three bottles of wine and stayed at the restaurant until after 1 am… Time flies when youre having fun.
             Naples was all about the pizza. The birthplace of pizza is reknowned for doing it right. And did they ever. The prices of everything in Naples were extremely cheap because the city was literally drowning in trash and unbelievable sketchy. I literally mean unbelievably. It is still a shock to me. But more on that in another post at another time. The one positive perk of this was that I had the best pizza of my life for 5 euro. I had a pizza with blue cheese, spinach, and walnuts, and it was incredible. My Italian food loving companion combined his passion for pasta and pizza by selecting a pizza with mozzarella cheese covered with Bolognese sauce and soft ricotta like cheese on top. I’m not going to lie, his was definitely better.
             On the last leg of our tour in Italy, we stopped in the small town called Rutigliano (near Bari—close to the heel of the boot) where my grandparents are from. We stayed with family there, and we got to truly experience what a day eating in Italy is like. For breakfast, or la collazione, you generally eat a croissant, or a croissant like pastry filled with chocolate, or cream. This can be accompanied by a collection of cookies and/or cakes, and is certainly accompanied by espresso. Luckily my aunt knows that I am a pansy and made me a cappuccino instead. Breakfast of champions. The main meal of the day is pranzo, around 2 in the afternoon, when everyone leaves work or school for an hour or two. Pranzo consists of a primo piatto (a first plate) of a pasta dish, a second dish of carne (meat or fish) followed by salad, and peppered throughout with lots of bocconcini, a type of mozzarella cheese and focaccia, a thick oily bread covered with tomatoes, or onions and cheese. Dinner or cena is a much later meal in the evening after 8 or 9, and unfortunately I did not get an accurate representation of this because I had another massive feast for my little cousins birthday party. I hear that cena is usually a smaller meal, but we had so much food at the party that it don’t believe it could be smaller than pranzo. On a day trip, we went to some of the surrounding areas, including Monopoli, Arberobello, and Polignano, where we had a granita: a cup with pane (or whipped cream) on the bottom, coffee flavoured ice, and topped off with more pane.
             Now its time to walk it all off in Greece…

Lost in Translation

Believe me when I say that there is no better way to learn a language then by immersion. Before a few days ago, I thought I could get by in an Italian conversation. I thought that when I spoke to my grandparents, we were speaking Italian. I thought that when I spoke with train station attendants, waiters, and other passers by in Italy that I was speaking Italian. I have since realized that the Italian that I was speaking was actually akin to pig’s latin, and I was like a child playing at a language game.
             On the train into Italy from Nice to Florence by way of Milan, my partner and I were in a compartment with 2 other young female students, an old man who lives in Monaco, and a churchman who is from Africa but lives in Milan. Between us, more than 15 different languages were represented. We carried on a conversation for 3 hours switching between French, English, and Italian. I knew enough words of what they were saying, and when I spoke Italian, I did not have too much of an accent, however my grammar was horrible. Past tense was entirely beyond me at conversational speed.
             At restaurants, train stations, and buying tickets for museums and galleries, I always tried to speak Italian because of my displeasure for waltzing into a country and expecting them to be able to accommodate me. On a few occasions, my Italian was complemented (“considering you’re American”). On more occasions, because my Italian was so atrocious, people could tell that I was not Italian and responded in English. I really liked it when people responded in Italian because I like to think that I actually did a good job in convincing people that I was Italian.
             My main frustration with speaking Italian is that so many words are readily available to describe precisely what I am thinking in English, but in Italian, I always end up saying, “that is nice” or “very beautiful”, which just seems so lame and flat to me, thus making me feel like I am being insincere. I thought hard about how my vocabulary exploded when I was learning English, and it came to me: I read voraciously. With this idea in mind, I bought Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone – in Italian—for a few reasons: 1) the level of reading is suitable for a younger audience, which I figure is roughly the level that my Italian is at; 2) I have read it way too many times, so I could use context/logic to figure out the meanings of words that I don’t know (elementary school reading buddies comes to mind) ; 3) the cover art is so cooool!
             For our last few days in Italy, I had the ultimate test. The full on language immersion experience. We stayed with my Italian aunt in Rutigliano, the small city where my grandparents are from. It. Was. So. Hard. I did okay during our first big family supper, because the stuff we were talking about was all stuff I had said before. Luckily, I have a few cousins my age who speak English incredibly well, so between English and Italian they managed to teach me some new things. By the first evening though, I had learnt so many new words and expressions. I even learnt how to use the past tense! Go me! My head was spinning so fast, and I felt that I was more exhausted than I would be after running 10 k. Learning a new language at immersion speed takes a massive amount of cognitive effort. However, I cannot deny the results. By the end of my stay in Italy, I was thinking in Italian first. I still occasionally accidentally respond to my boyfriend in Italian because some responses became automatic.
             As a Cognitive Linguistics and English student, I am so thankful for this experience, because it has solidified for me concepts that I have been learning about for the past 4 years. For one, I felt the impact of critical/sensitive periods for language learning. One of my aunts told me that I should go to one of my older cousins to practise my Italian with, and why couldn’t I speak as well as her. I thought about it, and her parents were born and raised in Italy, and when they moved to Canada and had her, Italian was most likely her first language. The same goes for my father and his sister, where Italian was their first language, so many of the words and the verb conjugations are automatic. The second thing that I am really interested in is the mindframes that certain languages produce. It is really hard for me to think of inanimate objects in terms of masculinity or femininity, so I often end up using the wrong article that accompanies a word. But for any native speaker of a language, knowing the gender of a word is automatic. In many cases, there is no rhyme or reason why a word would be assigned the gender that it is, but yet, its there. I wonder what impact this has on people’s worldviews that they are born into labeling things into genders. And this concept extends beyond gender. How does the language that we speak impact our worldview? We do not have words in English for some things that are not prevalent in our culture, but does that impair our way of thinking about things outside of our everyday life?