The Nautical Chart - Hardcover

Pérez-Reverte, Arturo

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0151005346 ISBN 13: 9780151005345

Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2001

Synopsis

Coy, a suspended sailor with time on his hands, meets the beautiful Tßnger Soto in Barcelona at a maritime auction and embarks on an adventure to recover the Dei Gloria, a Jesuit ship sunk in the seventeenth century by pirates. 125,000 first printing.

About this title

About the Authors

Arturo Pérez-Reverte is the internationally acclaimed author of The Fencing Master, The Seville Communion, and The Flanders Panel. Translated into nineteen languages in thirty countries, his books have sold more than three million copies worldwide. He is a well-known newspaper columnist and worked as a television journalist before becoming one of the world's most widely read and best-loved writers. He was born in 1951 in Spain where he still makes his home.

Arturo Pérez-Reverte is the internationally acclaimed author of The Fencing Master, The Seville Communion, and The Flanders Panel. Translated into nineteen languages in thirty countries, his books have sold more than three million copies worldwide. He is a well-known newspaper columnist and worked as a television journalist before becoming one of the world's most widely read and best-loved writers. He was born in 1951 in Spain where he still makes his home.

Reviews

A suspended sailor and a gorgeous woman who works at Madrid's Naval Museum join forces to uncover a sunken galleon and find themselves in hot water. From the author of intellectual thrillers like The Flanders Panel.
Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Popular Spanish novelist Perez-Reverte (The Fencing Master; The Club Dumas) is known as "the master of the intellectual thriller." But his customarily skillful blend of pop erudition and conscious borrowing of literary precedents threatens to capsize this tale of a race to retrieve a fortune in emeralds that sank off the Mediterranean coast of Spain in 1767. Manuel Coy is now in the Conrad phase of his life, having previously lived a Stevenson period and a Melville period. He is a "sailor exiled from the sea," his pilot's license suspended for two years after he ran a merchant ship onto an uncharted rock in the Indian Ocean. Attending an auction of nautical relics in Barcelona (in his "Lord Jim jacket"), Coy watches a beautiful young blonde woman outmaneuver a menacing ponytailed man to purchase a 17th-century nautical chart of the Spanish coast by Urrutia Salcedo. The woman is Tanger Soto, of Madrid's Museo Naval; the ponytailed man is a famed pirate of sea salvage, Nino Palermo. Coy comes to Tanger's defense when he sees her being threatened outside the auction house by Palermo thus putting himself in the service of a woman he is sure will eventually betray him. The characters are only too aware of the affinities of their story with The Maltese Falcon, and with a whole library of sea literature. Perez-Reverte is too accomplished a novelist to write a truly dull book, and the underwater sequences that climax the story are masterfully done. But any sea adventure that is more than half over before it makes it to the sea has to be in some kind of trouble. (Oct.)Forecast: This may not be Perez-Reverte at his best, but his second-best will be more than good enough for most readers. A first printing of 125,000 copies and a five-city author tour are in the works.

Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

*Starred Review* Through four novels, Perez-Reverte has established himself as a master of the literary thriller. Whether his subject is chess (The Flanders Panel, 1994), rare books (The Club Dumas, 1996), the Vatican (The Seville Communion, 1998), or fencing (The Fencing Master, 1999), and whether his focus is contemporary or historical (often it is both, with overlapping plots), he unfailingly melds a multifaceted tale of intrigue with characters of depth and dimension. There is always an internal drama as well as an external one, and the richness of detail, both historical and personal, is never set decoration but always relates in a complex way to the characters and their situations. All that is true again in his latest effort, which addresses a new and rich topic: sunken treasure. Serving out a bogus disciplinary action, Coy is a sailor without a ship, as uncomfortable on land as he is calm at sea, which may account for his willingness to join Tanger Soto of the Madrid Naval Museum in her search for the Dei Gloria, a Jesuit ship sunk by pirates in the seventeenth century. With the help of the antique nautical chart of the title, Soto has pinpointed the location of the ship off the southern coast of Spain, but she needs a sailor to get her there and to help her outwit (and outfight) the rival treasure hunters also on the trail. It's much more complicated than that, of course, with layers of deception and betrayals within betrayals affecting both the search and the interpersonal dynamics. Adept as ever at mixing historical and contemporary material, Perez-Reverte takes his genrebending to another level this time by merging the swashbuckling spirit of the best sea adventures with an introspective, philosophical meditation on the idea of navigation. There is no universal meridian, Coy is forced to conclude, when the course being charted attempts to penetrate the human heart. Bill Ott
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Spanish master Perez-Reverte has a streamlined approach to novel writing: he takes a recherch? subject say, fencing or rare books and uses it to construct a story rich in suspense, detail, and character study. The territory he covers in his latest work (after The Fencing Master) is in fact the deep blue sea. Coy, a sailor suspended for two years from the Merchant Marine, becomes infatuated with a mysterious woman named T nger Soto he encounters at an auction. There she has successfully bid on an old maritime atlas that will guide her to the Dei Gloria, a Jesuit ship downed in the Mediterranean in the 18th century. Soon T nger has drawn Coy into her scheme, which pits them against a thug named Palermo and his sidekick dwarf. All the elements are here for another literate thriller from Perez-Reverte, but this work is surprisingly less effective than its predecessors. The set-up is intriguing and the ending persuasively suspenseful, but in the middle stretches a long, becalmed section that dwells tediously on maritime detail and on Coy's endless seesawing as he considers whether to trust the obviously treacherous T nger. Perhaps those with a taste for the sea will be more drawn in; otherwise, this should work primarily for larger thriller collections.
- Barbara Hoffert, "Library Journal"
Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
• Publication date: 2001
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0151005346
• ISBN 13: 9780151005345
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 466