The Nautical Chart

A curious mixture of noir thriller, Tintin adventure and Moby-Dick. Perez-Reverte seems to be playing around with that most Spanish of subjects, the collision between real life and the romance of adventure stories. A heroine who can't make her mind up whether she's Mary Astor in The Maltese Falcon or a boy reporter with a quiff is confronted with a hero made up of equal parts of Lord Jim, Captain Haddock and Popeye, and they go hunting for sunken treasure in 1990s Spain. It sounds absurd, and the concept isn't helped by P-R’s habitual weakness for the worst noir clichés (the fist-fights, the sip-by-sip and blow-by-blow descriptions of every drink and cigarette, the mind-numbing misogyny of it all). But I have to confess to getting a show more good deal of pleasure out of it. Maybe some of that came from reading it in the original and having to puzzle out all the Spanish nautical terminology, but there is also something curiously appealing about the character of the sailor who still hasn't quite fallen out of love with the sea. show less

I do not know even after all these pages whether the translation sucks or the whole thing misses the mark ?

it feels like when you go to an elaborate dinner served by a drunk foodie couple whose overambitious menu features dishes with expensive and exotic ingredients that they just can't quite pull off while inebriated and interacting with their guests. Stuff comes to the table late, under or over-cooked. The dialogue is banal, and what should tickle the senses falls flat.

if you put a post-it over the author's name you might think Dan Brown and Clive Cussler's manuscripts got misfed in adjacent Xerox machines that spat out the pages and the people who came upon the papers scattered about published the stuff they picked up off the floor show more and shuffled back together. show less

I read this when it first came out over 20 years ago. I loved it back then as a swashbuckling adventure with sly references to the Tin Tin books The Secret of the Unicorn and Red Rackham's treasure. I have just re-read it, and while I still enjoyed it (I liked the narrative around the fact that the world is shrinking and that arts of navigating the seas without GPS are being lost), the world has moved on and Coy, the key protaganist does come out as a misogynistic and violent anti-hero.

An enjoyable story but not totally engrossing and at times the writing is a little more intricate than it needs to be making it hard work in parts. Not what I'd describe as a page turner but there was no way I was going to give up on it either.

No time for more than a brief note, alas.

Coy is a sailor confined to land for a couple of years because he accidentally ran a ship aground. He's lured by lovely museum curator Tanger into the search for a Jesuit ship that sank/was sunk in the late 18th century, and for its cargo of precious emeralds. As the tale slowly unfolds we're treated to a myriad smaller stories of Coy's earlier adventures among other men for whom, like him, the land seems a foreign territory and the sea their only possible home.

This longish text demands that you immerse yourself in it, that you invest in time in it; it's not really amenable to being read in ten-minute chunks grabbed here and there as other activities permit. If you're looking for rip-roaring, show more pulse-pounding action, this isn't for you (although there's some of that in it), but I found it entirely engrossing nonetheless -- it was a wrench to put it down each time I had to.

Margaret Sayers Peden's respectful translation serves the book well. Every now and then I was reminded, by an odd turn of phrase or some infelicuty, that this was a translation, but that occurred no more than a handful of times during the book; otherwise, the narrative read with great style. show less

Helped pass a dull daytime flight. Read a bit like a sub-Bond movie at times. Unreconstructed misogynist as anti-hero grated at times.

After reading Captain Alatriste earlier in the year, I felt overdue to revisit one of Perez-Reverte’s more contemporary novels. This one isn’t quite in the league of The Flanders Panel or The Club Dumas, but it was very enjoyable.

The story revolves around a sailor who has been barred from his naval career due to an unfortunate incident at sea. Attending an auction, he witnesses a curious bidding war over a very old nautical chart. Soon he is entangled with a femme fatale who thinks she has the inside track to a bountiful treasure lost at sea several hundred years ago.

As always, Perez-Reverte manages to weave considerable research into the story quite effortlessly. He just threads it into the action so you hardly notice how much show more you’re learning. Here we learn much of the nuances of a sailor’s life as well as a subtle history of mapmaking. So this is a good page-turner that will teach you a few things. But if you’re unconvinced, start with his other two books that I mentioned. show less