Aristotle and Dante: Perfection in Book Form
Title: Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe
Author: Benjamin Alire Sáenz
Publisher: Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers
Release Date: 21 February 2012
Context/Summary:
It is the summer of 1987, Aristotle “Ari” Mendoza is 15-years-old angry, reserved, with terrible dreams, a brother in prison who everyone treats as dead, and a father he desperately would like to connect with. He meets Dante Quintana at the pool. Dante is articulate and confident, with a love of art and intellectual things, and an open approach to life. Over the course of the next year or so, they form a relationship and connection that will change their lives, and struggle together with growing pains over identity, family, race/ethnicity, and sexuality.
Thoughts:
First off, I loved this novel. There is a reason this book has won so much critical and popular acclaim and so many awards.
The prose was clean and compelling. It was cut down straight to the bone, quite like the narrator Ari. There was a lot of narrative conveyed through dialogue. It was an accessible, easy read, but also beautiful.
Each chapter was short, almost like a vignette, and the book was further broken into parts. It kept the narrative well-paced and absorbing. There was a point about 2/3 through the novel that I thought the pacing lagged a touch – but it immediately picked up again.
Every character was amazing. Ari, Ari’s mother and father, Dante, Dante’s mother and father, and even the more minor side characters were well-formed and used to wonderful extent.
Ari’s confused (yet generally contained) feelings as he grows, as he compares himself to the boys who surround him, the disconnection, alienation, and even the superiority he feels, to me, as a queer white female, is so relatable. Even as he deals with other family issues and identity issues (as he is Mexican-American in the 1980s U.S. and has to deal with everything that comes with that), things I could appreciate and sympathize with, but of course will never have to deal with—Ari, his problems and feelings, still felt so relatable to me. Perhaps that’s due to some crossover with queerness, but perhaps it’s also due to the universality of emotion that Sáenz explores and articulates so magnificently.
Ari and Dante’s relationship was well-written and beautiful, the friendship-into-something-more relationship isn’t always done right in media, but it’s perfectly executed here.
Grade: 10 out of 10