Pearl's The Dante Club is a favorite, so I had looked forward to reading this. I found the historical note at the end to be the most interesting part of the book. The narrative is uneven--it floats in and out of a nineteenth-century literary style, and I found both the narrator and Duponte to be tiresome and self-involved characters. "Bonjour" is definitely the best female character, but she fizzles out by the end. Perhaps there are too many "unknowns" in the actual historical accounts of Poe's death to make the book convincing. I felt that Pearl was trying not to take the same sorts of liberties he did in The Dante Club--fair enough. The entire book read like a struggle, however, between character development and interpolation of history. The plot twists seem to come out of nowhere (which, while that can be a boon, gets tiresome when it happens consistently) and characters are introduced but hardly developed so that one has a hard time keeping track of who has done what. Still, the book reflects a lot of Pearl's gifts as a writer--he does manage to combine wit with drama in a way few modern authors can. Having had such vastly different reactions to The Dante Club and The Poe Shadow, I am now eager to read The Last Dickens, because I do enjoy Pearl's writing on the whole. While the book was not a favorite, I'm glad I read it. ( )

Once upon a time in high school (yes, high school) I read and loved Matthew Pearl's The Dante Club enough that I picked up Pearl's next book, The Poe Shadow, from a second hand shop at a point when I had too much homework to read anything for fun, and gave The Dante Club 5 stars when I got a Goodreads account about 6 years later.

This year, as I've been trying to weed out my book collection, I've realized that my reading interests have drifted from when I was buying books that I had no time to read to today. Hence my desire to dip into my older books when looking for a Halloween read.

So my reading experience could be as much a product of my changing tastes and interests as the quality of this book itself. Here's how the experience went, approximately:

25 pages in: Why is this guy so obsessed with Poe? And why is he so indifferent to his life-long presumed fiance?

50 pages in: Is this plot even moving?

75 pages in: I should probably stop. I've been trying to be better about that.

100 pages in: I think the plot just started.

150 pages in: I tell a coworker I am going to stop reading the book.

200 pages in: I complain to Areg and say I should stop reading the book.

250 pages in: I buy a few used books and put one in my field of vision as incentive to finish this book. Why am I even bothering to finish this book?

300 pages in: Why did I stick with this book so long? I'm so close to the end, it feels pathetic not to finish.

354 pages in (today): I nod off during the climax.

367 pages in: I read a fascinating 3-page afterword that thoroughly impresses me with the author's research and realize I'd much rather have read this as a nonfiction book.

It's not like it was bad, I just didn't enjoy it, and I don't know why I forced my self through it.

Plot (and lots of spoilers):

Quentin Clark, fan of Poe's exchanges a couple letters with him. When Poe dies and the press drags his name through the mud, Clark is enraged and tries to clear Poe's name by finding answers. Things happen, but nothing really seems to happen. He neglects his job and his supposed love. He learns that Poe's detective, C. Auguste Dupin of "The Murders on the Rue Morgue" and a few other stories, is based on a real person and faffs off to Paris to find said person and convince him to solve the mystery of Poe's death. Clark's main suspect, Duponte, is a retired police officer who resolutely does nothing, so Clark follows him around Paris doing nothing and trying to nudge him into helping. There's also a dashing lawyer "the Baron" Dupin who claims to be Dupin and wants to clear Poe's name to restore his own. Baron Dupin happens to have a sexy assassin wife whose only flaw is a scar on her face.

All four return to Baltimore, where Baron Dupin loudly proclaims he's going to solve the mystery and sells tickets for the day he announces his conclusions. Duponte tells Clark he will, but it's been two years since Poe died so he's not going to ask anyone because their memories will be corrupted by now. Again, Duponte sits around and does a lot of nothing but reading newspapers, so, for some reason, Clark does a lot of the same. Sometimes he goes off and Does Things but Duponte always tells him why those things were pointless. Nevertheless, Clark talks to people and learns even more good things about Poe. He absolutely detests Baron Dupin to an extent that is as baffling to me as his obsession with Poe is. Clark talks to someone else who almost ruined their life with their love of Poe. Apparently liking Poe and his work ruins people? Because, yeah, Clark's quit his job and his fiance says she's happy to be marrying his friend instead of him.

There is so much busywriting (like busywork: plotless writing instead of pointless work) that happens and so little of it amounts to anything. Duponte dismisses it all and none of it seems to build to anything of importance. There are tons of characters who speak Poe's praise to Clark but won't say anything publicly and who don't ultimately matter. Baron Dupin decides he wants to look like Duponte--I don't remember and can't be bothered to look up why--and he is a master of disguise so he makes it happen. Clark somehow gets accused of murdering Baron Dupin onstage on the night of his big reveal even though he was onstage where surely everyone could have seen that it wasn't him.

And then Duponte goes missing, presumed murdered by the sexy assassin; Clark goes crazy, actually by the doing of the sexy assassin; then goes on the lam and realizes that Dupin is just entirely made up and not based on anyone and instead stumbles onto a huge French conspiracy that has nothing to do with Poe and is taking place entirely offstage as President Napoleon stages a coup and becomes Emperor Napoleon. This barely-relevant, barely-mentioned piece of plot gets revived and Poe's basically out the window. The divorced American Bonapartes wanted to curry favor with the French Bonapartes by killing Duponte so that he couldn't expose the coming coup--but why the heck would anyone care about Duponte, when he had been in disgraced retirement with no signs of interest in going back to work? For a book chock-full of apparently true historical tidbits, the lameness of this is just...disappointing.

Oh, and apparently Clark's just magically off the hook for murder but a relative has decided only now that his obsession with Poe is proof that he is too mentally unstable to maintain the family estate, and somehow defending his good name in court will get him back the girl who somehow still cares about him even though he literally kept just forgetting to ask her to marry him even though she was turning into an old maid. Clark finds out Duponte isn't really dead, he just used Baron Dupin's desire to look like him to "become" the dead sleuth's older brother to hide from the Bonapartes who he somehow suspected of wanting to kill him in case he ever decided to come out of his house and care about the world again. As one does. And then Duponte decides to have someone fire a gun in the middle of the court case to clear the courtroom so that he can privately lay out for Clark in excruciatingly slow detail how Poe's death was just a series of unfortunate events. Even though Clark has been insistent for, like, 50 pages that the only way to prove his sanity is to pass off Baron Dupin's undelivered, over-the-top-ridiculous (and real) theories about Poe's death as his own, Clark decides not to say anything about Poe one way or another and still somehow saves his reputation and gets the girl.

And then I got to the end and just wondered why there was so much fat on what should have been a novella, or a nonfiction book about Pearl's very convincing and much less sensational arguments about what happened to Poe in his final days.

I'm not even glad it's done. It just is.

Anyway, time to move on to that book I was using to bribe myself... ( )

I really enjoyed Pearl's first book, The Dante Club, and this one kept me reading but I didn't like it as much. It didn't grab me or seem as smoothly plotted/written to me as Pearl's first novel. I do recommend it to fans of historical fiction/mysteries and to Poe fans. Customers at the bookstore have come back to tell me they really enjoyed it. I much preferred it to The Pale Blue Eye by Bayard. ( )

This book was great until the last 20 pages and the ending was TERRIBLE. The language was fascinating, the plot interesting, and then the author clearly ran out of steam. Very disappointing ending to an otherwise good work of literary fiction. ( )

I had really enjoyed Matthew Pearl's first novel, but this one didn't work for me. There are definitely some good ideas here (the usage of the two "Dupins", and the constant questioning of which is the "real Dupin" is pretty entertaining), but the plot is far too muddled and takes too long to go anywhere interesting. ( )