Pike, David L.Passage Through Hell. Modernist Descents, Medieval Underworlds. Ithaca: Cornell UP 1997. 292 pp. $ 37.50 hardcover. The descensus ad inferos-the descent into hell-is unquestionably of more suggestive and intriguing motifs in Western literature. It is also that has received extensive treatment in past. Confronted with burgeoning literature on topic (primary sources as well as criticism), Pike has opted for a novel approach. Rather than attempting yet another survey of subject, and rather than proposing yet another interpretation of classical texts, old and new, he has chosen focus his attention on some twentieth century texts that have been associated less frequently, if ever, with descent into hell tradition in antique and medieval literature. Woven chiasmically around two medieval-modern intertextual pairings-Peter Weiss and Dante, on hand (chapter three), and Christine de Pisan and Virginia Woolf, on other (chapter four)-the book opens with a survey of tradition (Homer, Vergil, Paul, Augustine, Bernard Silvestris) followed by a chapter on Celine, and it closes with a chapter on Walter Benjamin and a conclusion that focuses on two postmodern writers, Seamus Heaney and Derek Walcott. Clearly, this is an ambitious project and whose logic is not easily recapitulated, or fairly evaluated, within limited space of a few paragraphs. Among more focal modern texts into which Pike-against backdrop of Vergil, Dante and Christine de Pisan-undertakes his own enlightening interpretive descensi are Celine's Guignol's Band (1944), Feerie pour une autre fois (1952), and D'un chateau el'autre (1957); Weiss's Die Asthetik des Widerstands (1975-81) and Notizbiicher (1981 and 1982); Woolf's Orlando (1928) andA Room of One's Own (1929); and Benjamin's posthumously published Passagenwerk (1983). The underlying premise is that at some point in his or her life each author reached an existential crisis or nadir, a private hell that would be given narrative form in their idiosyncratic versions of Dantean allegory of conversion. In each instance, Pike claims, it is precisely medieval model of trope of descensus ad in ferns that can be made out as the site for creation of autobiographical voice (246). And as diametrically opposed as they may have been in political and generational outlook, Weiss and Woolf, Benjamin and C6line have in common that, at least in works dealt with in this study, they all resort trope of hell to translate individual allegory of conversion into a collective one (246). …