Dante's Purgatorio

For the benefit of those coming late to the party, Birk's Commedia transplants Dante's original three-part epic of spiritual pilgrimage from 14th century Italy to present-day California and beyond. In place of Dante's terraced purgatorial mountain, we get a lived-in cityscape of beleaguered palm trees and sooty freeway cloverleafs. Instead of the original Paradiso's saints and angels in all their maddeningly indescribable beauty, behold St. Peter as a paunchy rent-a-cop, Dante's beloved Beatrice as an earthy chola, and a strangely australopithecan Adam who looks more Darwinian than biblical. As with Birk's still unsurpassed faux-historical Great War of the Californias, and his canvases of California prisons in the style of the great luminist painters Bierstadt and Moran, past and present commingle here in a great satirical danse macabre. The two new books play counterpoint not just to Gustave Dore's enduring 19th century Dante engravings but also to Birk's own first volume of last year. Where Birk's Commedia began with the depressing image of a toppled grocery cart beside a spray-painted concrete parking bollard, the 33rd and final canto of the Paradiso opens with what, in Birk's clear-eyed but undespairing vision, passes for hope: a similar shopping cart, only now upright, presumably aspiring heavenward. It ain't harps and halos, but it'll have to do. As with the tree in Beckett's Waiting for Godot, which between the first and second act appears to sprout four or five leaves, we don't get paradise -- just progress. -- San Francisco Chronicle

Marcus Sanders is a contributing editor for Surfing and Surfline, and has written for numerous travel and surfing magazines. Born and raised in Canada, he lives in San Francisco.

Marcia Tanner is an independent curator and writer who lives in Berkeley, California.

Michael Meister is assistant academic vice president and professor of Religious Studies at Saint Mary's College of California.