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Book Review
Feb. 21st, 2012 12:22 amThe Club Dumas
by Arturo Perez-Reverte
This novel, part mystery, part adventure story, was a lot of fun to read. It follows Lucas Corso, an aging mercenary of sort, a hunter of rare books and manuscripts who works freelance for clients of dubious scruples. He gets mixed up with a manuscript of a chapter from Dumas' The Three Musketeers and an odd commission involving The Book of the Nine Doors, a seventeenth century volume of occultism and Satan-summoning. As the plot thickens, Corso finds himself enmeshed in a series of events that increasingly resemble part of The Three Musketeers, with himself as a sort of D'Artagnan figure - a fact of which he is quite aware.
Some of the things I enjoyed most about the book:
Lucas Corso is not really the most likable protagonist, but he is consistently interesting, which is what I most require of main characters.
All the literary reference and parallels, and the way Perez-Reverte chose to invoke and incorporate them really worked for me.It was both delightful and thought-provoking.
Reading this while taking Rare Books Librarianship and reading Nicholas Basbanes' Gentle Madness made it all that much more fun. Perez-Reverte did his homework, for the most part. Yes, there are people that eccentric and even bizarre in the rare book world. Yes, rare books are that valuable, coveted, and sought after. The only things that is utter fiction is the amount of smoking and drinking that the characters do while examining rare books - no one who knew what they were doing would ever do that, and no public or private library would allow such a thing. I think perhaps Perez-Reverte put in all the smoking and drinking to invoke the hard boiled and noir genres.
There are two references to Umberto Eco, one of which is quite amusing. Perez-Reverte is doing more than name dropping, but explaining why would spoil the ending, so I'll leave it at that.
by Arturo Perez-Reverte
This novel, part mystery, part adventure story, was a lot of fun to read. It follows Lucas Corso, an aging mercenary of sort, a hunter of rare books and manuscripts who works freelance for clients of dubious scruples. He gets mixed up with a manuscript of a chapter from Dumas' The Three Musketeers and an odd commission involving The Book of the Nine Doors, a seventeenth century volume of occultism and Satan-summoning. As the plot thickens, Corso finds himself enmeshed in a series of events that increasingly resemble part of The Three Musketeers, with himself as a sort of D'Artagnan figure - a fact of which he is quite aware.
Some of the things I enjoyed most about the book:
Lucas Corso is not really the most likable protagonist, but he is consistently interesting, which is what I most require of main characters.
All the literary reference and parallels, and the way Perez-Reverte chose to invoke and incorporate them really worked for me.It was both delightful and thought-provoking.
Reading this while taking Rare Books Librarianship and reading Nicholas Basbanes' Gentle Madness made it all that much more fun. Perez-Reverte did his homework, for the most part. Yes, there are people that eccentric and even bizarre in the rare book world. Yes, rare books are that valuable, coveted, and sought after. The only things that is utter fiction is the amount of smoking and drinking that the characters do while examining rare books - no one who knew what they were doing would ever do that, and no public or private library would allow such a thing. I think perhaps Perez-Reverte put in all the smoking and drinking to invoke the hard boiled and noir genres.
There are two references to Umberto Eco, one of which is quite amusing. Perez-Reverte is doing more than name dropping, but explaining why would spoil the ending, so I'll leave it at that.
