“Dante lite, the Inferno for beginners, the idiot’s guide to hell.”

Part student’s guide, part parody self-help manual, Going Through Hell offers a surprisingly light-hearted tour of the Nine Circles of Dante’s Inferno.  After a very short explanatory chapter, it plunges immediately into a fast-paced account of the poem’s narrative, interspersed throughout with humorous observations on how one might interpret its moral lessons in a more secular age.  Deliberately tongue-in-cheek in tone, it is nonetheless based on a legitimate premise: that quite apart from being a classic of world literature, the Inferno (as well as the rest of the Divine Comedy) actually is a mediaeval self-help book: instead of expounding his philosophy in “highfalutin Latin”, Dante made it directly accessible to general readers by giving it the form of an exciting story written in his local Tuscan dialect.  And while twenty-first century readers will hardly share the fourteenth-century belief in a literal hell situated beneath the earth’s surface, Dante’s allegorical meaning remains unexpectedly applicable to this day.