A narrator speaking to his dead beloved

“Amor mi mosse, che mi fa parlare” (“Love moved me, which makes me speak”). So declares Virgil to Dante at the outset of The Divine Comedy, explaining why he has come to serve as Dante’s guide through Hell: love set him in motion.Mark Helprin takes this line from Canto II of Inferno as the epigraph for his new novel, Elegy in Blue: A Novel, and the choice, we come to see, is not decorative; it is thematic. In the pages that follow, Helprin attempts to write a book in which love is not merely the subject but the animating force of the prose itself — the reason to write at all.The narrator of Elegy in Blue is an unnamed, recently retired 82-year-old Wall Street investment banker living in Brooklyn Heights. As soon as we meet him, he tells us that he is about to be killed.

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Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at Washington Examiner.