Now this is what a haunted house story should be.  Good atmosphere, creepy story.  Good characters.

This one was one weird cookie. And for my first forage in Duras, not an auspicious one.

The premise, such as there is one, is interesting (when we finally get to glimpse wtf, but hey, if you made it to page 3, you know the writing is... hard to get used to would be my kind assessment), and some of the way it's approached rings true. But 90 pages of it in a weird literary flight and such a dreary tone? Big pass.

It's like taking a Nîn short story, stretch it 5 times it's length, take all the joy of it till the erotic label barely applies, add some strange (maybe theatric cues? Maybe meta? Who even knows!) paragraphs, and presto, depressing incomprehensible shit for you.

*sigh* We bought an extra book of hers this august. Wonder if I'll ever read it.

I'm tempted to go looking up interviews, because I find it difficult to believe that this particular twist was planned for the more than the past two or three volumes. I don't own this series and therefore can't go back to look inconsistencies, but I can recall multiple times in the past when Ciel met with people who knew his parents who should have said something about the information revealed in this volume. I mean, there's no good explanation for why they didn't.

So on the one hand, I'm looking forward to reading the next volume and seeing where Toboso goes with this. It feels like we might be nearing the series' endgame. On the other hand, this twist feels cheap and annoying. And if it's revealed that 

Rating Note:

I feel like I'm rewarding bad behavior with my 4-star rating for this volume, but Toboso's efforts did have the intended effect of making me really, really want to read the next volume, so there's that.

(Original review posted on A Library Girl's Familiar Diversions.)

Done! *cheers* (and an abrupt end it was)

I confess I started to loose my enthusiasm by Purgatory, and Paradiso veritably dragged for me.

Inferno is indeed the most interesting, likely because it concentrates more on describing the poetic (and in many cases gruesome) justice inflicted there.

Purgatory gets a bit wishy washy because we are even more deluged with contemporary examples, which was exhausting from a "pausing to research WTF" whenever I needed context to understand the grade, and felt like self indulgent page bloating when I didn't. And then we get to Eden, pretty cavalcade of symbolism lead by the still much discussed mystery that is Matilda, and meet Beatriz. Ahhhh, the lady herself, that symbolizes theology. Maybe it is no wonder I found her supercilious and overly jealous.

I have to praise Dante's balls: first he aligns himself equal among Homer, Ovid and Virgil in that Limbo chat, and here he places his lady love highly enthroned in the Empireum, representing the Dogma by which he knows God.

If I could leave Paradiso just taking away that love has been his salvation and his way to heaven, we'd be good. But no, he had to insist on hammering until rigid conformity to scripture was reached. Thorough what felt like endless proselytizing (hey, I know it is my fault, because what was I expecting, right?) and pointing fingers of doom everywhere (the amount of eggs thrown the church's way! And his political enemies... you bet this got him the exile prophesied to him here).

Also, even considering some pretty descriptions, the spheres felt lame and boring reward (and here I'm reminded of Huxley calling happiness undramatic and boring, and Le Guin criticizing those that think "Only pain is intellectual, only evil interesting"). Where is the imaginative poetic justice of the first third? Methinks Dante got too tangled in the discussion of virtues and splitting hairs on their display levels. So yeah, I get the whole "watching god and feeling his light is rapture beyond comprehension", I'm still contending that the theological got in the way of the literary, and there goes one star. Sue me.