Inferno (novel)
Inferno is a novel by the American author Dan Brown , which was published in 2013 . It is the fourth thriller in the series about the symbolologist Robert Langdon . A continuation of the book series followed in 2017 with Origin .
action
Robert Langdon, professor of symbolology at Harvard University , wakes up in a hospital in Florence from a nightmare in which an elderly woman with long, silver hair asks him to “Search and you will find”. He cannot remember the last two days and everything that the young doctor Dr. Sienna Brooks and her colleague Dr. Marconi can tell is that he was shot and kept repeating "Ve ... sorry" when he arrived at the hospital. Before further explanation, a woman named Vayentha breaks into the hospital to gain access to Langdon's hospital room. She shoots Dr. Marconi, whereupon Sienna Brooks fled to her apartment with Langdon.
There she revealed to him that she had discovered something in a secret pocket of his jacket. It turns out that Langdon was apparently in possession of a biotube, a container that is used to transport biological samples and that can only be opened with Langdon's fingerprint. Surprisingly, however, it does not contain a pathogen , but a projector hidden in an old cylinder seal , which can display an almost identical copy of Botticelli's Mappa dell'Inferno . However, in the obviously manipulated work, there are some letters that are correctly arranged and meaningfully combine to form the phrase: CERCA TROVA - search and you will find. Langdon then realizes that the picture points to the Palazzo Vecchio , in which Giorgio Vasari also inconspicuously hid the phrase in one of his works. Langdon also realizes that he didn't want to apologize for anything at the hospital, but kept mumbling Vasari's name.
On the way to the Palazzo Vecchio, Langdon and Sienna are pursued by a mobile SRS team and have to hide in the Giardino di Boboli , but are able to successfully escape their pursuers and reach the palace. There they find out that there must apparently be further clues on the death mask of Dante Alighieri , author of the Divine Comedy . However, they are dismayed to find that the death mask has been stolen. Video recordings confirm the suspicion and even reveal the perpetrators: Ignazio Busoni, director of the Museo dell'Opera del Duamo - and Robert Langdon himself.
To avoid the police, Langdon and Sienna flee the palace. They are placed in the attic of the palace of Vayentha. Sienna manages to overpower Vayentha in a fight. Vayentha falls to her death through the ceiling construction.
Langdon and Sienna learn that Busoni died of a heart attack, but that Langdon left a cryptic message that Langdon can use to find Dante's death mask. You actually find the mask in the Baptistery of San Giovanni and discover a riddle poem on the back:
“You who are possessed of sane minds, notice the teaching that went about from the Schlei'r, this strange poem is hidden within. Find the treacherous Doge of Venice , who cut off the heads of horses and stole the bones of the blind. Kneel down in the gilded Mouseion of Holy Wisdom, then put your ear on the ground and follow the sound of dripping water, follow it deep into the Sunken Palace, because here in the dark the chthonic monster lurks in the blood-red waters of the lagoon in which the stars are never reflected. "
Langdon and Sienna are met by a man who calls them Dr. Ferris introduces, posed. He reveals to Langdon that he is on behalf of WHO Director Dr. Elisabeth Sinskey traveled to Florence to thwart the plan of the brilliant but at the same time obsessed biochemist Bertrand Zobrist, who wants to decimate humanity with a dangerous pathogen in order to solve the problem of overpopulation .
Langdon, Sienna and Ferris then travel to Venice to look for further traces in St. Mark's Basilica. There you find out that the enigma refers to the Doge Enrico Dandolo , whose grave is not in Venice, but in Istanbul in Hagia Sophia . Before they can leave for Turkey , Ferris, who has been in poor health all along, collapses and Langdon is caught by the SRS team that has resumed the chase. Only Sienna Brooks manages to escape.
Langdon soon realizes that the SRS team wasn't sent to kill him, but that Sinskey sent the team to get back in touch with the professor. He learns that an organization called the Consortium, led by a man who calls himself just Provost, has been helping Zobrist with his work for the past year by allowing him to conduct his research undetected. As it turns out, all the assassination attempts on Langdon were only fake, his amnesia was artificially created using benzodiazepines . Sienna should flee with Langdon and establish a relationship of trust with him so that he can switch sides. However, when the Provost realizes that he has caused enormous damage by covering Zobrist, he is forced to cooperate with the opposing side, the WHO. Langdon reveals that Sienna was in fact Zobrist's mistress, betrayed the consortium and now apparently wants to do everything possible to put Zobrist's plan into practice.
In Istanbul, Langdon, Sinskey and brothers, the head of the SRS team, visit Dandolo's grave and discover that the poem refers to an ancient cistern called Yerebatan Sarayı - Sunken Palace.
When Langdon and Agent Brothers find the place in the cistern where Zobrist has hidden the pathogen, it is too late. The virus was released a week ago and has now infected the entire world population. In the cistern they find Sienna. Langdon manages to pursue them. She can convince him that she was trying to prevent the virus from being released. She explains to him that Zobrist created a virus that acts as a vector and injects a gene into human DNA that will ensure that from now on a third of the world's population will be sterile .
The Provost and Ferris or Dr. Marconi (the doctor who was supposedly shot at the beginning), who was also involved in the deception, are arrested. Sienna Brooks will not be prosecuted as she neither created nor released the virus. She should now work with the WHO to develop a therapy . Langdon travels to Florence to return the borrowed death mask and then flies back to Boston. As the world changes dramatically, he watches the stars twinkling in the dark.
main characters
Robert Langdon
Robert Langdon is Professor of Symbolology and Art History at Harvard University . He is considered an expert on Dante Alighieri's Divine Comedy and was therefore appointed by the WHO Director , Dr. Elisabeth Sinskey, contacted.
Dr. Felicity Sienna Brooks / FS-2080
Sienna was born in 1980 and is the secret lover of the scientist Dr. Zobrist. It is known by the code name FS-2080 in transhuman circles . (This name is formed according to the same scheme as that of the Iranian - American writer, philosopher and transhumanist FM-2030 and is intended to show their affinity for transhumanism. The name was developed by Fereidoun M. Esfandiary from the first letters of the first and second name and the year in which he would reach the hundredth year of life.) She has an intelligence quotient of 208. In order to finance her medical studies , she had worked for the Provost and the “Consortium” for a short time and was thus able to assist the Provost Dr. Recommend Zobrist as a client. Sienna Brooks has psychological hair loss caused by depression in her childhood , so she wears a wig to avoid looking like a cancer patient.
Dr. Elizabeth Sinskey
Dr. Sinskey is the director of the WHO at the United Nations and a specialist in infectious diseases and epidemiology . At the age of six, she suffered from severe asthma and was treated with new drugs. These were the world's first glucocorticoids (steroid hormones). However, these later showed unexpected side effects : Sinskey had never menstruated during her puberty and learned at the age of nineteen that the damage to her sexual organs was irreparable. After a lecture for the UN in New York City , she is brought to the New York headquarters by a representative of the Council on Foreign Relations and there with Dr. Bertrand Zobrist's plans to reduce the world population from seven and a half billion to four billion again. During the operation, the SRS team is under the orders of Dr. Sinskey. Langdon misjudged that she was a prisoner of the SRS team and that she had been drugged because she had prescribed an hourly injection of the drug metoclopramide even after a loss of pressure caused paroxysmal positional vertigo .
Dr. Bertrand Zobrist
Dr. Bertrand Zobrist is a charismatic, recognized scientist in the field of genetics and germline mutation . He instructed the Provost to protect him from the international authorities and the WHO in order to be able to continue his research undisturbed. There he develops a pathogen that is able to sterilize a third of the world's population . Shortly before the pathogen is released, he commits suicide.
The Provost
The Provost heads the “Consortium”, a powerful private organization with offices in seven nations. This company provides professional deception services to the rich and powerful. In Italy the organization has its office on a ship, the Mendacium (Latin: lie / deception). His protocol obliges him to know as little as possible about his clients. When the provost realizes that he has thereby helped Zobrist to advance the research on the pathogen undisturbed, he tries to find it in order to save humanity.
Agent Christoph Brothers
Agent Brüder is the head of the SRS (Surveillance and Response Support) team. It works under the auspices of the European Center for Disease Prevention Control (ECDC).
Vayentha
Vayentha works for the Provost. She is dropped by the Consortium after a failed attempt to contact Langdon. During a chase through the attic of the Palazzo Vecchio, she is pushed from a platform by Sienna Brooks and falls through a ceiling fresco into the Hall of the Five Hundred , where she dies immediately after falling.
Dr. Marconi / Dr. Jonathan Ferris
Dr. Marconi / Dr. Jonathan Ferris is also a member of the consortium. In the hospital he pretends to be Dr. Marconi and staged his apparent murder with Vayentha. He later appears as Dr. Jonathan Ferris, WHO staff member, accompanied Langdon and Brooks from Florence to Venice. Langdon believes Ferris is infected with Zobrist's pathogen as Ferris has a severe rash on his face and neck. However, this is only an allergic reaction caused by the fake beard, which he calls Dr. Marconi carried, was evoked.
background
Inferno was released simultaneously in numerous countries on May 14, 2013. The date of publication is in the American notation 5/14/13 a numerical anagram of the number 3.1415, the approximate value of the circle number pi, which is defined as the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter. Fittingly, Inferno is about Dante's Divine Comedy , according to which hell is divided into nine circles.
The 685-page German translation was published by the Bastei Lübbe publishing group in a first edition of 700,000 copies. The cover of the German and the international edition shows the cathedral of Florence .
The translation of the manuscript was carried out under high security in the Mondadori publishing house in Milan. Eleven translators worked on it from February to April 2012 in a common room under strict surveillance. The German translation comes from Axel Merz and Rainer Schumacher.
The German audio book version read by Wolfgang Pampel was published at the same time as the novel .
In the last sentence of every part of Dante's comedy there is the word “star”, in the Italian original it is even the last word. Dan Brown takes up this. His novel closes with the words "The firmament shone in a sea of glittering stars".
Aftermath
Commercial win
Inferno was an immediate commercial success. In Germany the book was sold 150,000 times on the first two days of sale alone. One week after its publication, it immediately took first place on the Spiegel bestseller list in the “Hardcover Fiction” category.
In the United States and Canada, a total of one million hardcover or e-book issues were sold in the first five days of publication. The book reached number one on Nielsen BookScan's US bestseller list immediately after its publication, where it lasted for six consecutive weeks before dropping to number two.
Inferno also reached number one on the New York Times bestseller list , was the best-selling book on Amazon in early June 2013 and was number one on Media Control's bestseller lists in Belgium, Germany, France, Italy, the Netherlands, Austria, the May 2013 Switzerland and Spain.
Contemporary criticism
Lucas Wiegel man ruled in the world over Inferno again, Dan Brown grab "back to its proven knit" back and deploying "a scavenger hunt of attractions and works of art long sunken times. [...] However, the well-known cat and mouse game soon runs out of steam. ”The novel also contains“ severe plausibility margins ”, but it is“ at least better than its predecessor. ”
In the Süddeutsche Zeitung , Lothar Müller criticized Dan Brown and accused him of using a "reporting, phrase-like style". He called the book a “carelessly sewn off-the-shelf cultural thriller.” Despite the protagonist Langdon's studies at Harvard University, puzzles are difficult to solve for him that “many cultural tourists [...] even know when they don't studied at Harvard: that the Venetian doge Enrico Dandolo is buried in Hagia Sophia and that not far from Hagia Sophia the Yerebatan Cistern [...] is also known as the 'Sunken Palace'. "
In Focus, Julia Bähr complained that Brown had "withdrawn very much to his tried and tested scheme" when writing. Nevertheless, "the descriptions of the impressive locations [...] are a great pleasure" and "[t] he suspense [...] perfect."
In the FAZ, Andreas Platthaus complained that Dan Brown called “ Botticelli's famous illustration of Dante's Hellmouth, which plays a central role in the nested reference system of the novel, as a“ painting ”[…] that is supposed to hang in the Vatican Library . As a sensitive drawing, of course, it never does. "
Ijoma Mangold criticized in the time the logical flaws of history, "the narrator himself is an unfair lying demon who so selectively reflects the inner monologues of his characters, narrative logic places of truthfulness that the reader be deceived in their true intentions must. Shortly before the end there is a big 'April, April': The chase from the beginning was only staged by an all-powerful consortium to harness Langdon in their own services. I could imagine that real thriller fans would reject such tricks. But since I'm not a thriller fan, the rickety thing about Inferno didn't bother me. "
Criticism of the representation of Manila
In the book, Manila , the capital of the Philippines , is referred to as the “gateway to hell” in connection with a near rape of Sienna. In an open letter, the Chairman of the Greater Manila Administration, Francis Tolentino, criticized the passage as an "incorrect description of our beloved metropolis". Despite the fictional framework, "the Filipinos [...] are nevertheless very disappointed with the portrayal of their capital as a dirty place full of poverty and crime".
“For every person Sienna fed, they stared hopelessly at a hundred others. Manila suffered from unbelievable traffic jams, suffocating smog and a terrible sex industry that was mostly made up of children. Children who were sold to pimps by their own parents, not out of malice, but in the knowledge that the children would at least get something to eat in this way. In this chaos of child prostitution, beggars, pickpockets and worse, Sienna was suddenly paralyzed. Everywhere she saw how people were driven only by their survival instinct. When we are in despair, we become animals. Then the depression returned. All of a sudden, Sienna saw humanity for what it really was: a species on the edge of the abyss. "
filming
In July 2013, it was reported that Columbia Pictures was planning to film Inferno with Tom Hanks in the lead role. Directed Inferno led - as in the two already filmed books - Oscar winner Ron Howard . The film was released in German cinemas on October 13, 2016. The premiere was planned for the following day in the United Kingdom , among other places . The launch in the USA took place on October 28th.
literature
- Stephen Emmott : Ten Billion ; Suhrkamp, Berlin 2013, ISBN 978-3-518-42385-1 .
Individual evidence
- ↑ a b Julia Bähr: More secret than the Illuminati. New novel "Inferno" by Dan Brown. In: Focus . May 14, 2013, accessed May 22, 2013 .
- ↑ Til Biermann: Dan Brown has a secret with π. In: The world . February 27, 2013, accessed May 28, 2013 .
- ↑ Tim Walker: Real Inferno for Dan Brown translators who toil in underground bunker to decode his latest book. In: The Independent . May 7, 2013, accessed May 22, 2013 .
- ↑ Julia Bähr: "I was just suddenly gone". "Inferno" translator Rainer Schumacher. In: Focus . May 15, 2013, accessed May 22, 2013 .
- ^ First place for Dan Brown, record for Jonasson and news from the former chancellor. Börsenblatt , May 17, 2013, accessed on June 5, 2013 .
- ↑ SPIEGEL bestseller list: Dan Brown's “Inferno” at number 1. Book report , May 21, 2013, accessed on June 5, 2013 .
- ↑ 'Inferno' Has Huge Debut, But Below 'The Lost Symbol'. Publishers Weekly , May 23, 2013, accessed June 5, 2013 .
- ↑ Bestsellers: Dan Brown's 'Inferno' is No. 1. In: newsday.com. June 4, 2013, accessed June 5, 2013 .
- ↑ 'Second Honeymoon' knocks 'Inferno' from top of US best-sellers list. Reuters , July 4, 2013, accessed July 4, 2013 .
- ↑ Dan Brown's INFERNO Tops NY Times Best Sellers and Amazon's Marketplace, Week Ending 6/2. In: broadwayworld.com. June 2, 2013, accessed June 5, 2013 .
- ↑ Dan Brown number one in Europe. Media Control , June 12, 2013, accessed July 4, 2013 .
- ↑ Lucas Wiegelmann: Brown's "Inferno" - Scavenger Hunt to the Übermenschen. Die Welt , May 14, 2013, accessed May 27, 2013 .
- ↑ Lothar Müller: Fiasco of the lurking messages. "Inferno" by Dan Brown. Süddeutsche Zeitung , May 16, 2013, accessed on May 27, 2013 .
- ^ Lothar Müller: "Inferno" by Dan Brown - Tacking sewing machine of the plot. Süddeutsche Zeitung , May 16, 2013, accessed on May 28, 2013 .
- ↑ Julia Bähr: "Inferno" - In the clutches of Dan Brown. Review of the new thriller. Focus , May 15, 2013, accessed May 27, 2013 .
- ↑ Andreas Platthaus: Let everyone go Dante. FAZ , May 15, 2013, accessed on May 28, 2013 .
- ^ Educated citizens on the run. Retrieved June 23, 2013 .
- ↑ Dan Brown: Inferno . Bastei Lübbe, 2013, ISBN 978-3-7857-2480-4 , p. 521 .
- Jump up ↑ Manila angered by Brown's description as the "gateway to hell". In: RP-Online. May 24, 2013. Retrieved May 26, 2013 .
- ^ Filipino criticism of new book by Dan Brown. (No longer available online.) In: DRadio Wissen. May 24, 2013, formerly in the original ; Retrieved May 26, 2013 . ( Page no longer available , search in web archives ) Info: The link was automatically marked as defective. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.
- ↑ IMDB Release Info
