Photo Album

Stopping for lunch with some new friends in Manhattan, Summer 2013

 At the Orso 88 restaurant in Rome, 2008

With Roberta and all the grandchildren at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Summer 2012

Roberta Louise, Puget Sound,Seattle, July 2011

With Lisa and Laura, Christmas 2005

Lisa and Laura, c. 2000

Making meatballs with Madeline and Elizabeth, 2007

Elizabeth and I Christmas shopping, December 22, 2002

Bobbi and I at McKeon's Restaurant book signing for Ciardi:
a Biography, September 1997

Dan Brown's "Inferno"--First Thoughts

          Dan Brown is back on his game with his new novel Inferno, which puts the failure of his (nevertheless best-selling) last novel, The Lost Symbol, behind him once and for all.  It's good news for Brown, of course, but it's also good news for the millions of readers who have been hoping to see more of the high octane writing they loved so much in The DaVinci Code.
          Of course, Brown has his critics, readers who object to discursive novels that are part travel books, part art history lessons, part symbol chases, and only part mystery and suspense.  For me, however, and for millions of others if we can trust Brown's sales figures, the balance of these parts is effortless fun, popular fiction with an engaging intellectual twist.
          But the new book will surely drive Brown's critics just a little crazier than the earlier books did because it adds yet another level of talk, this time on the evils of eugenics and overpopulation.  Inferno focuses on the planet's inability to supply the needs of an increasing population that, at its current rate of growth, will one day soon become bigger than the ecosystems that have so far sustained it.  Figuring out the moral rights and wrongs facing the characters (and all the rest of us) is half the fun of the book, and the other half is realizing that easy conclusions are impossible, that the issues are more complicated than they at first appear to be.
          The moral consequences of the story, however, are woven neatly into the narrative, which is typically convoluted in the Brown fashion, full of twists and turns that pivot on symbols and hidden messages in art works and buildings.  Robert Langdon, the art historian professor-hero of four Brown novels now, is so super-humanly tuned into the art and architecture of Inferno that Brown sheepishly defends his hero by explaining that he has an "eidetic" memory, which is one "marked by extraordinarily detailed and vivid recall of visual images," according to one online definition.  It's not necessary for us to know this, but it doesn't hurt either.  Langdon is clearly better able to connect the dots of history and art and architecture than anyone who ever lived, but, okay, I can live with that.  It puts the fun in motion.
          The literary and architectural images in Brown's Inferno are from Dante's Inferno as well as Dante's city, Florence, where half the novel takes place before heading up to Venice for another large chunk of narrative.  Langdon must solve more than one mystery at a time in this book, however, which takes him from one museum to another, one religious or public building to another, one painter and painting to another, and finally one country to another, for the last quarter of the book takes place in Istanbul, where East meets West.
          In the end, readers either love the wild ride of Robert Langdon and thrill to the social and moral implications of the story--or like British critic Jake Kerridge in the Daily Telegraph, hate Brown and the new book:  "As a stylist, Brown gets better and better," Kerridge writes:  "where once he was abysmal, he is now just very poor."  Happy phrasing, but too harsh.  Apparently popularity like Dan Brown's needs to be attacked by self-styled arbiters of taste, like Kerridge, who feels personally wounded that Brown has found a voice and a character and a formula that readers in huge numbers like reading.  He probably hates Dickens too. 
      

A Decade of "The DaVinci Code". . . and an Old Lunch Date

The DaVinci Code by Dan Brown is celebrating its Tenth Anniversary this month and has sold, according to its publisher in a recent New York Times ad, an astonishing 81 million copies.  It dominated the Times best seller list for 136 straight weeks—more than two and a half years.  The USA Today reports that it led the best seller list for two different years, 2004 (after initial publication) and 2006 (after its rerelease when the movie appeared). The publisher claimed after its first year of sales that the book sold more copies in a single year than any other adult novel, ever.  I was there at the outset in the spring 2003, first buying a copy and falling immediately under its spell, and then later buying the audio version that I listened to in the car.  I couldn’t get enough of it.

Eighty-one million’s a lot, but there are a few adult novels that have done better, like Charles Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities (1859), which has sold a nearly incomprehensible 200 million copies in 153 years, undoubtedly a figure that has been dramatically inflated because the public-domain book has gone through uncountable editions and been force-fed to endless numbers of bored high school students.   J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings (1954-55) has sold a slightly less astonishing 150 million (in 57 years).  Agatha Christie’s 1939 And Then There Were None sold 100 million.  J. D. Salinger’s 1951 The Catcher in the Rye trails The Da Vinci Code by 20 million and Vladimir Nabokov’s 1955 Lolita trails it by 30 million.  So eighty-one million copies in a decade is impressive by any standard, especially when you add in the number of other readers who got the book from libraries, audio editions, eBooks, online and brick-and-mortar used book markets, and the uncountable number of personal copies that were (and still are) being passed around among family and friends.

Like so many others, I read all Brown’s earlier books too.  They were mostly a waste of time, although Angels and Demons (2000) introduced protagonist Robert Langdon to us and promised something better to come, which of course happened three years later with the phenomenon of The DaVinci Code.  In 2009 a third book in the Langdon series was published, The Lost Symbol, but it was a terrible disappointment for everyone hoping for another DaVinci Code.  The Freemasons were not as much fun as conspiratorial antagonists as the Catholic Church had been.  Brown’s fans, myself included, are hoping for a return to form in his new book, Inferno, which is scheduled for publication next month, May 2013, but realistically, the chances are slim to zero that he will capture lightning in a bottle again.  For now, however, hopes are running high.
          With all the prepublication hoopla attending to the birth of this new book,  I had to pick up The DaVinci Code once again, maybe one last time, just to see how much I still might enjoy it.  And perhaps in one sense it is a surprise that I did, and do, like it very much. I remember a lunch I had in 2005 with my daughter Laura, then an editor at New American Library, and another editor at the same firm, Tracy Bernstein, in charge of Signet Classics, which published introductions, prefaces, and afterwords of mine for books by Dante, Milton, and Longfellow.  They seemed pleased with themselves when, between soup and salad, they ambushed me about my feelings on The DaVinci Code.  Why, they seemed to be saying with mischievous grins, does a man with a taste for the classics, like Dan Brown’s potboiler and Super Best Seller? 

I didn’t take the bait, squirmed a little bit, and then repeated what an old friend once told me about his main criterion for judging books.  He said he liked the ones he finished.  That was glib and evasive and maybe partly true, but I really did want to say something more serious and thoughtful about the book that had, after all, captured my imagination as no other popular novel ever had before.  If I had taken the bait, I might have said something like this. 

First, the book is fun to read from first page to last, a fast-paced murder mystery with attractive lead characters.  Second, there are several very evil villains who take turns with the attention of the good guys and all the readers too.  But overlaid onto the murder mystery grid is an entire structure of religious conspiracy so persuasive as to make us wonder what part of the construction is true—or if all of it is.  Or none.

Then there is the code itself, the hidden messages said to have been left by Leonardo DaVinci in his masterworks.  We are told by Brown that DaVinci was one of a secret society called the “Priory of the Scion,” whose mission was to preserve the truth that Jesus was secretly married to Mary Magdalene, the heart of the “sacred feminine” and the mother of Jesus’ children.  In the presentation, it is all very plausible, so plausible in fact, that it has spawned a cottage industry of Christian scholars forced to find exactly where Brown went wrong with his facts.  All of which is amusing:  this is a novel, after all, a piece of fiction, so one doesn’t demand of it the same standard of truth that non-fiction has to meet.  For all I know, there may be some truth to it, but it has been fun watching the Christian world take to battle stations just to  "prove" that Brown was wrong about Jesus and Mary.   

I am not a huge fan of pop fiction, not even the escapist enticements of murder mysteries, but this is a mystery novel about a conspiracy supposedly hiding big secrets in the Catholic Church.  It contains a stunningly tempting argument, and I was merely one of 81 million who found the union of murder mystery with Catholic conspiracy theory (suppressing the "fact" that Mary Magdalene was the wife of Jesus and mother of his children) completely irresistible.  Then there is the Holy Grail and “sacred feminine” to bring into the conversation.  What fun!  I can’t understand why everyone in the country hasn’t bought a copy.  Or at least borrowed a friend’s—or taken one out of the library. 

I wish I might have said something like that at the soup and salad lunch with my daughter and my editor, but I do feel a little easier now that I got around to saying it here.  Finally.

Ruth Ann and a Lifetime of Teaching

          Three months ago I heard from a student I taught thirty years ago, Ruth Ann Peters, who sits today at the very edges of my memory, her features blurry after a lifetime of classes and students.  Dredging faces up from the muddy past is asking too much of a memory that weakens rather than sharpens as the years roll by.  That's the curse of a long career in the classroom.  But Ruth Ann is different, for even though I no longer have a firm memory of her features, I do have a firm and warm sense that we had a good connection all those many years ago, that we in fact liked each other.  That, of course, is not unusual, for over the years there were many to like—it’s the best part of the job, even if their images fade irretrievably.

            Ruth Ann saw I was registered on Facebook and sent me a note late in December 2012, hoping to "reconnect."  I replied politely of course, and then she wrote something back that I will always treasure:  “My favorite Cifelli memory,” she wrote, “is that you once gave me an A- on a paper and a comment that read, ‘This grade has more to do with your intelligence than your diligence.’  It has stuck with me till today reminding me that good is not good enough if I know I can do better!”  Imagine that a single seed sewn three decades ago rooted itself and still thrives in the life of a student I barely remember.  I couldn’t be more thrilled.  
          Teachers realize early on that happy classroom memories generally dissolve into cool, thin air as the years march along.  Holding onto them is as difficult as grabbing mercury--and then Miss Ruth Ann suddenly appears with a wonderful moment from 1983, a moment guaranteed to warm a January day thirty years later.  What a wonderful surprise.  And to Ruth Ann, thank you my dear, it means a lot.

The Pope's Resignation Mystery

Tampa Bay Times, Letter to the Editor, Feb. 18

Pope's unorthodox move raises many questions. . .

          Here's what seems odd about the pope's resignation: Every really old pope over the past 600 years, since the last resignation, has probably grown too intellectually and physically feeble to do the job well. It's a lifetime position, and often lifetimes drag on beyond the point when anyone can do a good job. Which leads to the conclusion that over the last 600 years deputies have stepped in quietly to continue the work until the doddering old pope finally dies.

          So what makes this pope's condition different from any of the other old popes before him? Why aren't there papal helpers who can step in under the radar and take care of business for his last few years? Or is he being pushed out under the weight of pedophile priest and Vatican bank scandals? That's an unpleasant thought, but it makes more sense than that no Vatican staffers could be found to step up and silently help the pope through his last faltering months and years.

Edward Cifelli, Dade City