Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe

by Benjamin Alire Saenz

This book by Saenz and was first published in 2012 and since then has won four esteemed Awards: the American Library Association, the Stonewall Book Award, the Pura Belpre Award, and the Lambda Literary Award.

Let us dive into the review.

Summers were mostly made of sun and heat, but summers for me were about the storms that came and went. And left me feeling alone.

Did all boys feel alone?
The summer sun was not meant for boys like me. Boys like me belonged to the rain, (Saenz 293-294). 

The protagonist and the second leading role of this book were both named after ancient philosophers and political thinkers, who are famous for their writing about logical thinking and reasoning on different attempts to understand the world around them. Aristotle is one of the most well known philosophers of all time, and the name “Dante” was probably based off of Dante Alighieri, who was an Italian poet, philosopher, writer, and political thinker. Philosophers were obsessed with truth and reality. The title of the book is great because the characters Aristotle and Dante were discovering themselves throughout the book and what they wanted their lives to be, and aren’t our lives just our own little universes? 

I connected with the protagonist Ari right away. He is an introvert and doesn’t connect with other boys his age, or really anyone. He talks about looking up to guys a few years older than him and not understanding their obsessions with girls and how can’t see himself ever going through that girl-craze phase. 

Ari thinks about things deeply. He thinks about his connection with his father, mother, siblings, and other boys around town his age. He wants to control his life, but feels like there's only a few things he can control about it, and that's because he feels trapped, like he’s walking on eggshells. The fact he doesn't have a lot of friends and is good at fighting makes his parents nervous that he’ll follow in his criminal brothers footsteps, but it's his parents fear of him turning out like his brother and Ari’s own fear of letting his parents down that's making him feel trapped. 

Ari’s father is a Vietnam war veteran and is very distant and it bothers Ari, who wants to have a connection with his father. His father is described like he never came back after the war, like it wasn't over for him. 

The accident.

One major part of the story was a car accident that Ari and Dante were in. Dante was in the street saving an injured bird from being hit when a car came barreling towards him. Ari had pushed Dante out of the way and ended up getting both his legs run over. Both boys lived and Ari spent the rest of the summer in the hospital and when school started he was able to walk again. 

During this, Dante of course felt responsible and wanted to thank Ari somehow, which made Ari resent him. Ari didn’t want to feel like a hero for doing something to save his best friend. He feels like he didn’t do it, that it had been an instinct. 

During this time in their friendship, Dante let Ari look at his stretch book, and confessed his feelings for Ari that he loved him. The sketch book is symbolic of Dante opening up to Ari, about his feelings for him. Dante puts his feelings in black and white and Ari responds by choosing not to open the sketch book yet. He’s not ready to admit that he probably feels the same about Dante to himself yet. He is hesitant to not look into the sketchbook and see his own feelings reflected back to him.

I really enjoyed this story, there was some beautiful prose and lines, below I listed my favorite quotes.

“Maybe I would be happy. Maybe my life would be even worse. Not that I had a bad life. I knew that. I had a mom and dad and they cared, and I had a dog and a best friend named Dante. But there was something swimming inside me that always made me feel bad. I wondered if all boys had that darkness inside them,” (Alire Saenz 299).

”Sometimes, when you were older, you become someone younger. And me, I felt old. How can a guy who’s about to turn 17 feel old?”, (Alire Saenz 300). 

“I wasn’t really thinking. Sometimes, you do things and you do them not because you’re thinking but because you’re feeling. Because you're feeling too much. And you can always control the things you do when you're feeling too much. Maybe that's the difference between being a boy and being a man is that boys couldn’t control the awful things they sometimes felt. And men could,” (Alire Saenz 310).

I had a problem with the ending of this book. I am happy for Dante and Ari finally getting together, but I feel like Ari’s problems were bigger than just his sexuality. He talked about a darkness inside him, he always felt like he did or was something wrong, which I understand is accurate for anyone who might be questioning their sexual orientation, especially in 2012 when it was less socially acceptable to be openly part of the LGBTQ community, but it the reveal wasn’t big enough. It felt forced out of him by his parents. I think it would have been more impactful if Ari was honest with himself first, then his parents. 

I needed to see Ari going to talk to his brother in jail, and bringing Dante with him, so we could see how their relationship changed and how Dante is going to support Ari through life. 

I felt like getting with Dante shouldn’t have solved all of Ari’s problems, and that made the ending unrealistic and anti-climatic, it was like a sudden happy ending under a rainbow. But I do acknowledge that this book was written in a different time and probably helped a lot of people feel better about coming out.

I still loved this book and would definitely recommend it, but it is a downer with brilliant writing, so read this when you need something sad.

:)