The Nautical Chart

Rating:
Summary: Knowledgable and Fun - what more can you ask for?
Review: Picked this up as an airplane book. You know the type, an easy read, nothing to taxing, yet interesting enough to keep you reading. I am happy to report that the nautical chart met all of these criteria.

I do not read Perez- Reverte for the "mystery" element of his writing, because it is usually not that strong. Instead I read his novels for the aspects of the world that he shows me. In this case he concentrates on the sea. And this is the novels greatest virtue its portrayl of life at sea, its joys, its tedium and its dangers and those people who are drawn to it and feel at home no where else.

I also found myself liking the central hero Coy, who is a typical Perez-Reverte character - the man approaching middle age, beaten down by his experience of the world, hard bitten, cynical and at heart still dreaming for something better.

As highlighted previously the plot is the weakest element of the story. At its best it is a simple treasure hunt story with a twist in the tail, which serves as a framework for the author to regale us with his knowledge of nautical law and to introduce a range of unusual and amusing characters.

So to sum up - a fun atmospheric book which will likely increase your knowledge of things maritime.

Rating:
Summary: Engaging, but not Amazing
Review: Perez-Reverte's literary mysteries, as wonderful and entertaining as they tend to be, all follow a somewhat similar template, one that is faithfully reproduced here. It all starts with a somewhat highbrow subject-chess and painting restoration in The Flanders Panel, antiquarian books in The Club Dumas, the Vatican and Catholicism in The Seville Communion, fencing in the Fencing Master-which is represented here by cartography and sailing. Then he adds a hero who is an expert in the subject, and somewhat of a loner, removed from the mundane world around him or her. The expert/hero is activated by powerful persons whose interest in the hero's area of expertise is ultimately revealed to be linked to some murky historical episode which proves vital to the story. And finally there is a ending that is often surprising or ambiguous. That this template works over and over is a testament both to the skill with which Pérez-Reverte weaves his plots, and to his ability to carry the reader deep into the details of whatever subject happens to be the focus of that book.

In this book, Pérez-Reverte presents a fairly compelling hero, Coy, a born to the ocean, jazz loving sailor at loose ends. He's quickly embroiled in a treasure hunt led by the beautiful and always in control Tanger, who's in a race with a slimy Gibralterian professional treasure hunter and his sadistic Argentine dwarf enforcer. Simpler than any of his previous books, the story both directly and indirectly references the Dashed Hammett classic, The Maltese Falcon. As in that tale, most of the suspense is created by lack of information, which is slowly released to Coy in dribs and drabs, as well as the question of who's double-crossing who. This makes the main characters conversations a shade too melodramatic at times to be realistic, but this is balanced by his naunced capturing of Coy's total attraction to Tanger and her manipulation of it.

As so much of the book involves Coy and Tanger crouched over old maps, or discussing them, one wishes the publisher would have included some reproductions to help the reader out. Similarly, it would have helped a great deal to have an illustration of the two maint ships being hunted for, as there are pages upon pages describing their duel. This is rather frustrating, as without some basic knowledge of sailing and its terms, the reader is unlikely to be able to follow chunks of the writing. The book takes a bit too long to get going, although when it does, it is quite suspenseful, although the clues are a little more visible than usual in Pérez-Reverte's work. Unfortunately the ending doesn't live up to its buildup, and one suspects this eminently filmable thriller will have its climax tweaked for the big screen. All in all, it's not among his best, but still entertaining and highly readable.

Rating:
Summary: Good story for sea-lovers
Review: I have always loved stories related to the sea, and so this book appealed to me from the start. The premise is good: a grounded sailor develops a quick crush on a mysterious blonde he encounters at a maritime objects auction in Barcelona. He goes after her in Madrid and discovers she is looking for a sunken XVIII century ship, which should be buried under the sea outside the Mediterranean Spanish coast. And, she happens to be in need of someone with time and deep knowledge of the seas. Coy, the sailor, signs for the deal, not least because by now he is madly in love with her, Tangier. But it happens that there is someone else in search for the enigmatic ship, this time a professional treasure-hunter from Gibraltar, a man who has a very dangerous sidekick, an Argentinian ex-torturer. Coy recruits his old buddy, the Pilot, to take them in his boat and go looking for the ship. Why this ship attracts so many attention I will not spoil for you, but it is an interesting and exciting tale. Some reviewers complain about the long discussions on things maritime, but I tended to like them.

The book's strong points: the link to an ancient adventure and the historical background. Perez Reverte does his homework and is very good at surrounding his tales with historical roots. That gives the present-day adventure an epic aura. The political intrigue surrounding the historical event is another thing Perez Reverte likes to do and is good at. One further strong point that should be remarked, since it gives the book much of its appeal, is the author's ability to vividly depict places. Of course he has the advantage of locating his story in beautiful towns of Southern Spain, which hardly need any embellishment, and especially in Cartagena, where Perez Reverte himself was born and obviously knows very well. Plus, the story is ingenious.

Unfortunately, the book has one weak point, but one that is crucial in distinguishing a good novel from a great work of art. In fact, it is the cornerstone of great literature: the characters. The best-crafted character is the main one, Coy, a likable loser and basically a good and brave man. It is obvious, and the author makes no secret of it, that this character was inspired by Conrad's Lord Jim, but without the tragic, Shakespearean overtones. But most of his expressions are cliches. Nevertheless, I think every reader will root for Coy. The woman, on the other hand, is totally unlikeable. She's not even sexy. Another reviewer here was right when he thought of her as a spoiled little brat. I didn't want her to win. As a character, she's flat as flat can be. The Pilot is commonplace tough-but-good-guy, a wise old man. And the bad guys seem to jump right out of a Disney movie. The boss would be a wolf and the Argentinian a bad rat. They are the weakest point of the book.

Anyway, it's a good entertainment but don't look here for the great literary achievement.

Rating:
Summary: Lots of detail, perhaps too much?
Review: This is the first Arturo Reverte book I have ever read. The book was a good read, but it moves slowly at times and bogs down in details. But those details that it bogs down in are neccessary to tell the story, so who knows? Another problem and this is probably more on my end, it was hard to pick a timeframe for this book. I mean, the first few pages lead you to believe this book was set in the 18th-19th century time frame. However, when the main character "Coy" mentions using GPS and one of the vehicles described is an Audi A8, this is a very recent book. However, I was up until the wee hours to finish the last 100-150 pages because I couldn't put it down! If you like stories of suspense,the sea and a classic mystery scenario, then you can't go wrong with this book. All in all, its a good book, maybe one for those lazy days when you just want to get lost in a book.

Rating:
Summary: Beautiful story, but a rushed ending
Review: As another reviewer said, a good book but not up to the usual Perez-Reverte Standard (Like Club Dumas or The Fencing Master which are truly wonderful).

I felt the novel lost its wind (excuse the pun) when Nestor Perona, the narrator, introduced himself. And I lost interest... Things seemed too easy too expected from there on.

Too bad, because the beautiful lengthy narrative describing the life at sea, the naval and political strategies, the Dei Gloria, the relationship between Coy and Tanger, and the search along the Spanish coast had kept me riveted to the book.

The end seemed rushed and the final intrigue improbable. (I won't give more details not to spoil it for those who have not read the novel... But I could have read 200 more pages about the search at the bottom of the sea.)

(Note: I read the French Translation of the book "Le cimetiere des bateaux sans nom".)

Rating:
Summary: Not Perez-Reverte's Best!
Review: After Perez-Reverte's THE FENCING MASTER, I must admit I was up for a really good read. But this one didn't keep that promise. Well, of course, a batter doesn't get a hit every time he's up and I suppose that is the case even with a skilled writer like Mr. Perez-Reverte.

This tale starts with Manuel Coy, merchant seaman and pilot fallen on hard times, having been banned from the sea for two years, standing and clutching a bloody wound as the narrator introduces him and his story. But the narrator, himself, remains invisible to us until the last quarter of the book . . . and doesn't count for very much, when he finally does appear. In fact he barely plays any role in the tale at all, so it's not entirely clear why Perez-Reverte thought he needed such a distracting device.

Worse, the story the narrator is ostensibly telling us contains so many private incidents, which he could not possibly have been privy to, that his role as a recounter of these events strikes one as terminally odd. Either he's a liar or a spinner of fantasies, though when we finally meet him, there is no reason to think he is either. If he had not faded thankfully from view once more at the end, his presence surely would have ruined the entire wrap-up. But, in fact, at the end, our barely visible narrator is nowhere to be seen, gratefully forgotten by the author . . . just as he had been for the bulk of the tale.

Still, despite the fact that this story is often very slow going with a great deal of digression and seemingly irrelevant information thrown our way, an overly long slog to find the object of the search, and a singularly dull protagonist (Coy is forever attacking the other side in bloody dust-ups when they get together for various "peaceful" confabs . . . in fact he does it so often you have to wonder how dumb these clever, professional treasure hunters can possibly be, given their persistent failure to anticipate Coy's predictable attacks) . . . despite all of this, I have to say that the story still kept my attention, though I did tend to pick it up and put it down quite a bit more than I usually do when reading a good book.

The fact that Coy lusts after Tanger seems to be the only thing driving him and this, combined with his brutal conferencing methods, makes one wonder why she even keeps him around. Even he wonders about this himself, almost incessantly actually, though it doesn't seem to deter him or make him any more aware of his situation. In fact, Tanger's almost complete indifference to him, even after they seem to have hit it off, has to make you wonder just how dumb Coy can be. True, he's portrayed as a simple sailor, uneducated in all but the ways of the sea, but he seems abnormally dull, even for that. Even El Piloto, his old mate, seems to be sharper than he is.

The final denouement picks up the story's pace again, though the outcome is not particularly satisfying. It brings us back to Coy clutching at his bloody wound, having shown us how he got to that point . . . but it leaves us with no real sense that anything has really happened besides the landlocked sailor's brief excursion into the mysteries of other human beings which continue, at the end, to confound him. What Coy takes away from it all seems to be little more than the wound in his side, the blood running down his legs, and continued confusion.

And yet, despite the sometimes overly detailed facts about sea life, and the novel's faltering about midway though, it recovers at the end as we learn the secret in the story of the "knights and knaves." I won't tell you what that's about . . . but the book will if you want to try one of Perez-Reverte's less successful efforts. It is readable if you've the patience for it.

SWM

Rating:
Summary: Sags in the middle
Review: "We could call him Ishmael, but in truth his name is Coy." So starts Arturo Perez-Reverte's The Nautical Chart, an at times self-concious sea-faring novel involving the hunt for lost treasure off the coast of Spain. Coy has been suspended by the authorities for allowing his ship to go aground. To pass the time he attends auctions in the town where he's staying, and he meets a young woman who buys a 250-year-old chart. Naturally, this leads to a confrontation with a bad guy, and Coy winds up helping the young woman decipher what the chart means, and recover what it leads to.

There are several problems with this. First, the author in previous books has had plot twists and murky happenings. In this volume (as in The Fencing Master, which I read just before this) there are no twists like that, so the author seems to feel he has to replace them with something. As a result, the prose here is, at times, so overwritten and dense you wonder if he intended for anyone to read it. Paragraphs sometimes (I'm not exaggerating) stretch past two pages in length. Plot digressions (where the author stops the narrative to ruminate about something) sometimes last for most of a chapter. The conceit of this is that the book is actually written by a narrator (a minor character from the end of the book) and he is presented as an insufferable pedant. This explains why the character is this way, but not why the author decided to write the book in this fashion.

Those objections aside, The Nautical Chart is a good story, and a decent book. I did enjoy it, and am going to go looking for The Seville Communion, the one in the series I missed.

Rating:
Summary: It could have been a contender
Review: Some years ago I read Arturo Pérez-Reverte's 'The Club Dumas' and I enjoyed it a lot --despite finding it too easy and predictably a page-turner. (If you want something depper and brainny try Umberto Eco's Foucault's Pendulum )
What I liked most about it was the way the author developed the situations, making it a non-stop thriller about books. Now, when I started reading 'The Nautical Chart', I was expecting something more or less in this way --something that at least kept me interested me in. Little did I know that the two books share only the same author in common. 'Chart' is much more boring and less interesting than 'Club'.

Supposedly this book takes you to place where many others have taken you before, such as 'Moby Dick', 'Master & Commander: The Far Side of the World', 'Old Man and the Sea' etc. It is about the SEA and the relationship that MAN can have with it. It feels like this link is to be a metaphor, or something like it. It could have been a contender, but it is not. I believe the main fault are the main characters, Coy and Tanger. Question about Coy, like 'what's up with this man?' floated in my mind all the time. And about Tanger, the clear vision I had of her is a spoiled little brat. Not forgetting to mention the 'bad guys'. They couldn't be more cliched. Another thing that spoils the reading is the abundance of details --moreover, useless details. You keep waiting for the story to come, and when it does, you're too tired of reading the details of ships, and sailors' way of life.

But, I still have some faith on Perez-Reverte. Yes, I do. I had so much fun with 'The Club Dumas' that I can't start hating this guy. One of these days I will try another of his books. I only recommend this one to his die-hard fans.

Rating:
Summary: A Good Book to Read While Quarantined...
Review: Sometimes it's not even the book itself, but where, how, and why you read it that makes it memorable. For instance, right now I'm in quarantine in a major Canadian city after having inadvertently been in contact with someone who subsequently developed SARS. I do not necessarily have the disease, but I may get it and pass it on to others; and to protect society I have to stay sequestered in my home for at least ten days.

So for want of anything better to do I read this book, author previously unknown to me, the book picked up for a fraction of its original cost on a whim at a remainder sale. I think it was the cover that probably first attracted me: a nifty design that includes a compass rose and the torn fragment of a chart from the Spanish coast. You don't have high expectations for literature under such circumstances; about all you might hope for is some degree of diversion.

And diverted I really was! Although the plot is certainly not original (it can be summed up as a search for sunken treasure and the double-crosses that inevitably take place in the process), the way in which it is played out definitely is. For someone with plenty of time on their hands and no where to go, the story unfolds with welcome slowness and frequent forays into the abstruse details of maratime lore, coastal geography, centuries-old history, and Hispanic culture. The characters emerge gradually, rather than being presented full-formed. They assume a richness and depth not common in most adventure yarns, and are set in a intricately woven atmosphere that is seductive in its ambience. And the language is complex and cadenced to match the deliberate spiral to the end that seems inevitable when it finally comes but willingly isn't until that moment.

I could think of worse ways to spend a quarantine.

Rating:
Summary: Hugely disappointing
Review: I am a fan of Arturo Perez Reverte, and waded through this book. Sorry I did. Stupendously boring, I'm sad to say. I could find nothing to recommend. Give it a pass.