Book review: The Rule of Four by Ian Caldwell & Dustin Thomason

The first book I read in November was The Rule of Four by Ian Caldwell and Dustin Thomason. It's a bibliomystery and is about two friends at Princeton trying to figure out the codes and secrets held in a mysterious Renaissance book, the Hypnerotomachia Poliphilli (which is real!). Murders start happening, and they start searching for clues for those too. They have to find all the answers before their dissertation is stolen or they're kicked out of Princeton. Read the official synopsis here.

The authors are two best friends who also both went to Princeton, so the setting felt real and lived in. The characters felt a bit stiff and formal, more like adults in their late twenties and early thirties than college students, but I was invested in them and their friendships. This may be because the book is set in 1999, but I don't think that would make the characters more mature. I liked the friendships between the four young men. I liked how Tom and Paul's friends helped with the riddles and clues; their med student friend helped with the medicine stuff, and Tom's girlfriend helped with riddles that had to do with her own major. The plot with the Tom and his girlfriend Katie was interesting enough, and she did feel mostly like a fleshed-out character, but I would have rather spent more time with the book. 

The HP incunabulum and its history was my favorite part, of course; there were so many things that I learned about in rare books classes (Aldus Manutius!) and things about Italian renaissance history, science and art (Florence! the Bonfire of the Vanities!).  The cryptology stuff was fascinating, with hidden messages encoded in the text which contained riddles, with the numerical code to the next riddle contained in each answer. The rule of four refers to the last numeric code needed to detect the book's hidden messages. One riddle had to do with who gave Moses his horns, which Paul did not get immediately. I call bull on this; everyone who tangentially knows anything about renaissance art and the Bible knows that Moses has horns in Michelangelo's statue of him because of a mistranslation (rays and horns being the same word). Paul, who knows Italian and Latin and basically everything there is to know about Renaissance Italy and its art, history, you name it, would have picked up on this right away. Paul says in the book that Michelangelo (or Jerome?) depicted Moses with horns because he felt only God should have glory radiating from His face, but I don't think that's true. 

The Hypnerotomachia Poliphilli wove its way through Tom and Paul's lives and the lives of Tom's father and his friends, who became Paul's advisors and mentors. The HP was a source of life-long obsession to these men, and it impacted their relationships with their partners and each other. Tom's father being obsessed with the HP damaged his relationship with his wife and son, while Tom's obsession with the HP strained his relationship with his girlfriend. Tom's father and his friends echoed Tom and his friends. This book deals with loss, obsession, academia, friendship, depression, relationships, and more. It was very sad but very fascinating. I loved the HP parts but I don't think I'll reread or keep this one. It stayed with me for a while. 

Score: 3.5 out of 5 stars
Read in: November 2-3
From: the thrift store?
Format: paperback
Status: giving away

Trigger warnings for this book: murder, death (various methods, some of them violent), car crash, blood, semi-graphic major injury, other injuries requiring hospital stays, alcohol overuse, obsession, depression, sex, mentioned nudity, sexism/misogyny, privileged Princeton pigs

Book review: The Second Mrs. Giaconda by E.L. Konigsburg

[Spoilers throughout because this is an old story about an older event and I don't care]

E.L. Konigsburg is the author of From the Mixed Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankenweiler (I think that's the title; I'm not bothering to look up the spelling), which I love. I've read a couple of her other books and really like her voice/writing style. I was excited about this one because it's her take on why a thieving apprentice might have been important to Leonardo da Vinci and why LdV might have painted an unknown merchant's second wife when he had all the big names in Italy begging him for a portrait.

Clearly she loves the Italian Renaissance era and finds it fascinating, as this is the second (as far as I know) of her books that deals with a secret behind a beautiful artwork by a teenage mutant ninja turtle  Master from that genre/era. However, I was disappointed in this book. The premise was interesting, and while I feel that the idea that Salai (the aforementioned apprentice) was Leonardo's foil and basically allowed him to be carefree and daring vicariously through him, as well as Salai being in love with the duchess, had a lot of promise, ELK basically did nothing with these ideas. There was a lot of description and scenebuilding, everything that ELK is good at, but there was no plot. No one really had anything to lose (although the duchess dies and it's sad because everyone liked her and she's the sole rounded female character). There were no stakes. No one really changed much at the end of the novel. It just was kind of dissatisfying.

Salai as the protagonist is almost entirely unlikeable. He has no moral scruples whatsoever and is completely baldfaced about it, with no negative repercussions to anything he does. The tone of the book didn't match with Salai's tone and vocabulary, which was weirdly slangy in a 20th century way. Despite the title, the subject of the Mona Lisa literally enters the book about three pages from the end. According to this book, Leonardo painted the portrait of this second wife of a nobody merchant because Salai saw that she was basically who the duchess would have been had she lived, and he talked Leonardo into doing it. Yep. Freaking Salai. I don't hate this book, but I feel annoyed that ELK didn't turn it into what it could have been. This could have been really something. It's like you had all the necessary ingredients to make a really good cake, but instead you have a weird flat boring doughy substance that is edible and not that bad but it makes you mad because you could've had delicious cake! 3/5 stars probably

Michelangelo's paintings on the Sistine Chapel ceiling

On this day, November 1, 1512, Pope Julius II unveiled Michelangelo Buonarroti's frescoes on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel in Rome for the first time. It took Michelangelo four years to paint them, and he hated it. He wrote this poem about it, which I love because it's one long complaint:

To Giovanni da Pistoia
"When the Author Was Painting the Vault of the Sistine Chapel"

I've already grown a goiter from this torture,
hunched up here like a cat in Lombardy
(or anywhere else where the stagnant water's poison).
My stomach's squashed under my chin, my beard's
pointing at heaven, my brain's crushed in a casket,
my breast twists like a harpy's. My brush,
above me all the time, dribbles paint
so my face makes a fine floor for droppings!
My haunches are grinding into my guts,
my poor ass strains to work as a counterweight,
every gesture I make is blind and aimless.
My skin hangs loose below me, my spine's
all knotted from folding over itself.
I'm bent taut as a Syrian bow.
Because I'm stuck like this, my thoughts
are crazy, perfidious tripe:
anyone shoots badly through a crooked blowpipe.
My painting is dead.
Defend it for me, Giovanni, protect my honor.
I am not in the right place—I am not a painter.

Not a painter! I love him. I went to the Sistine Chapel when I was in Italy, and it was glorious. Absolutely gorgeous and breathtaking. I'm sad he was forced to do it and that he suffered, but I think it was worth it because of the beautiful legacy he left to the world. Think of all the people who have been uplifted by its beauty.

You can read all of Michelangelo's poems here
The text of the poem is from this Slate article, which is excellent and you should totally read it
Image source
History info is from The Writer's Almanac's enewsletter for today