Matilde Asensi

I have absolutely no interest in The Da Vinci Code or any books of that sort, but I picked this up for two reasons: my last name is Cato, and it was only $2 for a hardcover at the Phoenix VNSA sale. Personally relevant and cheap!

I was pleasantly surprised by this massive book. Once it got going, I was completely snared. The main character, Ottavia, is a high-ranking nun working in the Vatican. She specializes in ancient manuscripts and research, and therefore she's stunned when her superiors show more need her expertise in a new assignment - identifying unusual tattoos on the corpse of a dead Ethiopian. To complicate things more, the dead man was carrying along bits of the True Cross - the one Jesus died upon - and bears scarification that suggests a long-lost religious order may not be lost after all. Along with a stoic Swiss Army captain and brilliant Coptic Egyptian, the three of them work through linguistic riddles and discover the key to everything is hidden in plain sight - Dante's The Divine Comedy. As other churches around the world reel from the theft of their fragments of the Cross, Ottavia and the others rush to join this hidden order so they can stop the pilfering and confront the enigmatic leader of the group, Cato.

Reading the book reminded me of Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. This is an intelligent, well-researched book and it was a great deal of fun. The ending had a nice twist that was followed by a bit of a cliche, but that was fine. I was concerned that I'd go through all 458-pages and be disgusted by the ending, as I was recently with Edgar Sawtelle, but that wasn't the case here. It ended like it should. I have no regrets about this $2 purchase. show less

I thought the plot of this True Cross conspiracy meets Dante was way over the top and I didn't like the ending. None of the main characters worked well for me and I found the heroine particularly implausible, especially her Sicilian background. That said, it was well researched and there was enough food for thought in parts of it to encourage me to read more of this writer. She is clearly very knowledgeable. I enjoyed what she had to say about Byzantium and she offered some very interesting show more insights into the Orthodox Church. I am currently reading Asensi's Iacobus, a medieval tale about the lost treasure of the Templars and so far, I think it is a much better book. The translation is better than in The Last Cato. This could be because the book is written in a medieval style and is suited to formal English. show less

A Dan Brown-esque adventure based on a complicated MacGuffin using Dante's Divine Comedy to provide clues to the whereabouts of the True Cross of Christ. Actually, a pretty entertaining story, plenty of action and characters that are believable and grow as the book unfolds. Definitely a good summer read although not without drawbacks. The story behind the nun's Sicilian family was not really developed.

Strangely, I found the passage of time in the book very hard to follow. Most of the action show more passes in hours, but then a sudden shift reveals months have gone by! The action seems to be described in short bursts with no linking narrative to convey the time passing as the characters follow their quest.

A disappointment for me is the translation. The language is stilted and clumsy, most of the jokes falling flat or not being properly told. It may be the troubles with time are a result of this translation rather than the original novel. Asensi has been done a disservice here. show less

It would be easy to pass Matilde Asensi's The Last Cato off as another of the myriad Da Vinci Code clones flooding the book-market today. Unfortunately, since this book was published in Spain back in 2001 (well before the antics of Robert Langdon rocketed Dan Brown to the top of the bestseller lists), Asensi's work isn't quite as easily ignored. Published in English for the first time this year by Rayo (a HarperCollins imprint), The Last Cato is very much in the same genre as Da Vinci, The show more Rule of Four, and all the others which use classical literature to uncover modern-day misdeeds.

In this case, the misdeeds are a string of thefts from churches around the world - thefts of the various slivers and chunks of the "True Cross." The culprits: the mysterious Staurofilakes, a mysterical brotherhood charged with protecting the Cross when it was whole. But why are they now collecting the pieces? Answering that question becomes the job of an unlikely team: Ottavia Salina, a scholarly nun who works in the Vatican Archives; Kasper Glauser-Roist, a meaty Swiss Guard and Vatican "consigliere" (in the Godfather sense); and Farag Boswell, an ethnically-mixed archaeologist from Egypt.

The trio set off on a bizarre but entirely expected quest through the route that aspiring Staurofilakes must take to prove themselves worthy of the honor. Their road map? Dante Alighieri's Purgatorio, which contains the clues they need to make their way from city to city and survive the challenges that await them there. Dante, you see, was himself one of these Staurofilax characters (although how no one ever noticed the sect's ritual scarifications on him remains undisclosed), and using his text, Salina and the others go on their not-so-merry way, &c. &c. I won't say any more and spoil the plot, but you get the drift.

I must say that within this genre, The Last Cato is one of the better examples I've read. Unfortunately that's not saying all that much. While I found the fairly lengthy explications of early church history and True Cross lore somewhat appealing, it would be nice to know what's real and what Asensi's making up (the lack of a "Historical Note" is one of the major faults, even if it was nice to see her footnoting some of the various quotations she uses in the text). The writing and/or the translation is uneven, which creates some weird Spanishized Latin names that haven't been rendered back into English, along with a few rough patches of dialogue. I had (very) high hopes that the heroine's religious status would preclude the obligatory romantic subplot, but alas, it's here.

All in all, not an awful book (and perhaps slightly better than Da Vinci Code), but that's as far as I'll go.

http://philobiblos.blogspot.com/2007/03/book-review-last-cato.html show less