From: World Literature Today | Date: September 22, 1997| Author: Cocozzella, Peter | COPYRIGHT 1997 University of Oklahoma. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan.  All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group.Copyright information

Arguably, a novel is a multilayered composition. If at the surface there is, say, an Enzo Fontana, a reader who is also a novelist, at a deeper level we are likely to find Dante, the poet par excellence who is also a reader. In Fontana's own unfolding of Dante's visionary dream, the Florentine bard reads - or, to be precise, strives to read - directly from the book he perceives in the mind of God. Through Dante's ingenious recapturing of the universal analogy, which lies at the found...