An Infernal Revision: On Dinty W. Moore’s “To Hell With It”

"To Hell With It"

In Italy they’re celebrating seven centuries of Dante The Divine Comedy was finished in 1321, also the year Dante died but I doubt anyone there has whipped up a carnival so wild as Dinty Moore’s. Long a champion of creative non-fiction, in this text he delivers what might be called “multi-media creative.” To Hell With It tosses together Moore’s hand-drawn cartoons and his old family photos, it toys with his Catholic-school catechism and meanders with him through the Midwestern flea markets, and the whole way, whatever the ostensible subject, it works canto by canto through Dante’s formidable opener to the Comedy, the Inferno. 

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