Ulysses, Dante, and Other Stories

A uniquely brilliant, insightful, learned, passionate, funny ‘monologue’ in six chapters on Dante’s Ulysses, which is also a compelling introduction to the beauties of the Divine Comedy — and of some of the great literature associated with it, from Pico della Mirandola to Primo Levi. The only book on Dante in which the bibliography makes irresistible reading, its scholarship (whether creative, post-, or punk) is genuine and profound, even if often it turns out to be comically deflated in the autobiographical context of the down-to-earth experiences of the mother and teacher who has written it. Elena Lombardi’s irreverent love of Dante and literature is moving and inspiring. — Lino Pertile, Professor of Romance Languages and Literatures, Emeritus, Harvard University, author of Dante popolare (2021) and Dante controcorrente (2023).

Ulysses, Dante, and Other Stories hides within its simple title something infinitely more delicious and digressive (but not, let me stress, deceitful): a series of overlapping divagations — the aquatic metaphors are irresistible — on desire, reading, and reading as desire. There is a wideness to this book’s culture — like, in the words of an English hymn, ‘the wideness of the sea’. You’ll find some expected figures and voices — Homer, Virgil, Ovid, among the ancients; Levi, Walcott, among the moderns — as well as some more unexpected ones: Rimbaud, Claudel, Saba, Aznavour, Tina Turner. But it is not the degree of expectation that makes the difference; it is what one does with expectancy: the place set for the stranger who may or may not arrive, the stranger that each of us becomes to ourselves, the moment we are deracinated and, if you will, re-racinated by a literary or lived encounter that truly changes us. This is the book’s lush wager: that, with and against Dante, we can be washed ashore on the beach of our own longings and find there new bright things — perhaps, as in the book’s concluding image, initially lusterless, but only apparently so: awaiting our own brightening touch and enlivening voice. At one point, this book suggests that desire may be ‘the human superpower’, and it is a testament to the book’s compelling, ironic, reflexive voice and vision that the reader emerges from it feeling a bit like a dazed and dazzled hero, at once hoarse with desire and somehow surprised by his, by her, by our new, old eloquence. — Cary Howie, Professor of Romance Studies, Cornell University.