GUISE DID YOU KNWO THAT ROBERT LANGDON IS TALL AND HANDSOME??!1!

I can not ever give a Dan Brown book more than a three for a handful of reasons. One, his books are completely absurd. Two, his writing is barely adequate to the task and kind of hilariously out of sync for the tone of his books, which are somber and pretentious. Three, he cannot let you forget anything in the book that barely  resembles characterization.

So while the art criticism or whatever counts for it in the first three books gets by me as fine because I don’t really know much about it, the silly literary criticism stand in in this book is just downright silly.

Yes, Dante is super important and when you read him in college, it’s fun and interesting, but there’s this kind of over-inflation of the text because Dan Brown is just not a critic in this way.

So anyway, Robert Langdon has amnesia! Oooooooh. I have had amnesia too, for a few minutes, when I fell and hit my head something fierce. I only can’t account for a few minutes…..not three whole days. I just don’t buy it.

Anyway, he wakes up in Florence and he’s already in the middle of a mystery. His watch is lost, so how else will he have a personality?!

I dunno, I think the mystery got better. There’s zero reason for him to have amnesia, but the twists are pretty good.  But man oh man there’s a bad undercurrent of homophobia in this book (Robert Langdon doesn’t like to look at dongs in paintings and a bad bisexual man did bad things!) So take that as you will.

 

But who know….maybe I will reread Dante now.