Dante afresh …

… ‘Hell’ Review: The Wholly Lost Below - WSJ. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

Though unabashedly intellectual, Mr. Gray has always written toward a working-class readership that, his work insists, possesses more than enough aesthetic appreciation, curiosity, and intelligence to dislike language “added to make the sentences sound better than they were.” Unsurprisingly, his version of Dante is active, playful, a little colloquial and, more than anything, concise.