Sundress Reads: Review of A Book About Myself Called Hell

A personal growth narrative applies twofold to Jared Joseph’s A Book About Myself Called Hell (KERNPUNKT Press, 2022). In the book, which reads almost like a travel diary, Joseph documents his reading process of Dante’s Inferno, an epic poem in which Dante journeys through Hell as a living being. The parallel narratives for Dante and Joseph reveal the nested nature of the book’s themes, mirroring and re-forming like the concentric circles of Hell. 

A Book About Myself Called Hell is a truly impressive work of critiquing and weaving, of joking and wondering, and it is funny. Joseph does it all intentionally, with nary a misplaced comma, and by the end I felt devastatingly seen and understood. The book is precisely human. I recognized my soul’s questions mirrored in the confusion and absurdity of both Joseph’s and Dante’s wanderings. The sentiment is captured perfectly in Job 9:12, which is featured in the book as an epigraph: “Who can say to Him, what are you doing?”. Who is running this life of ours? How can we ask what on earth is going on? 

Joseph’s book unfolds in three sections. First, there is a brief introduction to Inferno and why Joseph is reading. The middle is made up of critical commentaries for each canto. Finally, Joseph puts together a multiple-choice section with upside-down answers, reading like a Choose Your Own Adventure novel. This last part enhances the book’s conversational nature; Joseph is telling the readers a story and interjecting with context and anecdotes, to which we respond, but all we say in the end is why is Hell so funny and why can’t we laugh?  

The book is adventurous and searching, perhaps because it is somehow a compilation of asked, unanswered, and re-asked questions, occasionally specific but often metaphysical in nature. This essence is what made me feel understood and impressed at the same time: somehow, through a lot of swearing and crude analogies, Joseph pares away the bullshit and gets at some philosophical truth. The absurd humor of the book hinges on a tension between the ancient and the modern, and Joseph bridges the gap through continuous questions and eventual answers. He accurately dissects the structure of Inferno, referencing Dante’s life and numerological affiliations (Beatrice, basically), and analyzing the terza rima rhyme structure that reinforces the structure of the narrative. As well as this technical efficiency, Joseph demonstrates an intimate understanding of the soul struggle which pierces Inferno and carries into his own book: how can we make sense of this strange, contradictory existence that is human? Many little inversions reinforce the idea of heaven being hell, hell being life, and the journey out of hell being downwards to get back up, such as “they [finally] get to wet ground” (Joseph 25). Hell becomes a home for all the comically absurd, and the comically absurd include a lot of questions. 

Some of the genius of the work is that, in almost every canto’s commentary, a reference offered earlier is revisited in some sensible, conclusive way, such that everything feels very satisfying. Joseph brings us into his thoughts as he reads Inferno, reminding us that he is laughing with us at all the absurdity, and tying things back together when the questions start to get too big. I invite readers who have not read Inferno, either recently or at all, into Joseph’s narrative for the eccentric father-son relationship of Dante and Virgil, and for the hilarity. 

For those with an interest in Dante, Classics, humor, or the existential, this will prove an absolutely worthwhile read. Joseph demonstrates understanding of historical context, accurately touching on Florentine political conflicts and the tension between antiquity and Christian orthodoxy in the Italian Renaissance era. The whole project is kind of lovely because today’s angst at Covid-19, climate change, and the death of God is comparable somehow with that of the dreamy intellectual of the Middle Ages, stuck between pagan antiquity’s distant paradise and the reality of Christendom and plague. Either this was already apparent to Joseph, or he picked a really good quarantine read. In either case, A Book About Myself Called Hell makes sense. It is roaringly funny and intimately beautiful.  

Jared Joseph’s A Book About Myself Called Hell is available from KERNPUNKT Press

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Isabelle Whittall is pursuing a Bachelor of Arts in combined Philosophy and Political Science at the University of British Columbia (UBC). She co-hosts the radio show Hail! Discordia! on CITR 101.9fm, and is an Editorial Board Member of UBC’s Journal of Philosophical Enquiries.