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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
55 of 63 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
good historical novel--but less depth than follet's work,
By
This review is from: Cathedral of the Sea (Hardcover)
"Comparisons to Ken Folletts Pillars of the Earth are being made..." is a bit too deceptive for my taste. Cathedral of the Sea is a good historical novel--with a good translation--about life in Barcelona in the 1300's. The central figure, Arnau Estanyol, spends part of his life carrying stones for the building of a cathedral. But the cathedral is not a dominant factor in the book. In Follett's Pillars of the Earth, the building of the cathedral and its architecture was a dominant central factor. In the sequel--set in the 1300's like the review book--the cathedral is still a significant factor, though not as dominating as in Pillars. So if you're expecting to read about the architecture and the building of a cathedral in Barcelona in detail, you won't find it here.
Follett's two novels had a lot of depth, and dark mystery. Cathedral of the Sea is more straightforward--there are not the politics, the undertones, the buried (literally) secrets in Follett's novels, and the characters are often rather one-dimensional. But it does give a good sense of time and place, and life in Barcelona in the 1300s is probably less familiar to US readers than life in England at the same time. The Black Death sweeps into this novel, as it did in World Without End, and you'll also get a view (similar to Follett's works) of the contrast between the poor, the wealthy, and the nobility. Some of the elements in this novel seem a bit contrived: Arnau rises from an orphaned runaway serf to become a major figure in Barcelona, and marries into the nobility. In Pillars of the Earth, Tom is a skilled artisan: the rise in rank is much less, and more believable. Unlike World Without End, the Inquisition enters the scene. There's an interesting comment from an Inquisitor to the effect "Pain is an acceptable means of extracting confessions, so long as it does not result in death or the loss of a limb". This seems to have a familiar ring to it. So overall, what you get is a well-written historical novel, with a good portrayal of time and place that has some of the flavor of Follett, but without the complexity and depth of both the story and the characters in Follett's novels.
20 of 24 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
"Can these people really be your representatives?" - Arnau Estanyol,
By
This review is from: Cathedral of the Sea (Hardcover)
Ildefonso Falcones' novel, set in Catalonia, has been compared to Ken Follett's Pillars of the Earth, both positively and negatively. Pillars of the Earth is one of my favorite books, but I have enjoyed Falcones also, even though its style is different. Follett's book is a consistent page-turner; Cathedral begins more slowly but as the plot and characters develop, becomes a real page-turner also. Falcones includes helpful background history of Barcelona and 14th century Europe which will probably be unfamiliar to most American readers. You may want to skim the sections which describe the battles for control of the Mediterranean and for recapture of the areas of France which were originally Catalan. You can still understand the story without remembering the names of all those kings!
Cathedral was a best-seller in Europe. I would never have heard of it had I not found a copy in my hotel breakfast room in Bordeaux this summer. It was written in Spanish and has been ably, but not flashily, translated into English. The style is plain and direct. If you don't require heightened dramatic language in your fiction, then perhaps you will like this book. The title reflects the setting of the book, Barcelona during the years when the cathedral Santa Maria de la Mar was built. If the descriptions pique your curiosity, google the cathedral and you will find wonderful pictures on various web sites. Its design is unusual and the story of its construction "by the people and for the people" of Barcelona is worth knowing. This book is a fine way to learn more about medieval Catalonia while enjoying the ins and outs of a complex plot, plenty of moral conflict, and interesting, unpredictable characters. We first meet Arnau Estanyol as a baby, when his father Bernat is forced by his feudal lord's violence to choose between servitude on his own land or a chance of freedom if he flees to his sister in Barcelona. At the age of fourteen, Arnau joins the Barcelona guild of bastaixos, or porters, who load and unload cargo from the ships and who serve the Virgin of the Sea by carrying the stones from which her cathedral is to be built. (You can find a photo of a relief sculpture of such a porter on the website Sacred Destinations.) Eventually, with the help of a Jewish family, he becomes a wealthy moneylender and financier. He is a good man, and finds a way to stay true to himself even as he is forced unwillingly to marry the king's ward and become a nobleman. In this position, he cleverly finds a legal way to free the peasants from the many exploitive laws which prevent them from earning a living as free men. He avenges his father's humiliation and death without undue cruelty - but the small mercy that he shows comes back to haunt him as the enemies of his family nearly succeed in destroying him. Some turns of plot are so positive that one questions their probability; but other events balance this out with all-too-realistic negative endings. It would be nice to think that a noble of Arnau's station would have been given the power by a technicality in Catalonian law to set entire provinces of serfs free from feudal requirements; I am not enough of a medievalist to know. But Falcones' author's note details many of the historical facts on which his fiction has been based and gives one confidence that his history is reliable. Individuals work the laws of Catalonia to their own advantage, and good-hearted nobles like Arnau are caught in the middle, as are peasants and slaves and tradesmen. There are chilling descriptions of the operation of the Inquisition in the villages and in the city of Barcelona, as well as of Christians' willingness to believe that the Jewish people crucify children and defile hosts. These scenes, and the portrait of Arnau's brother Joan who first becomes a Franciscan and then a Dominican inquisitor, are probably the basis for comparisons of this book to Brown's Da Vinci Code. However, Falcones' Joan is a more complex and tortured character than Brown's albino monk, and Falcones' history, unlike Brown's, has a firm factual basis. The opinions of women and peasants voiced by many characters in the book have been taken from the 1381 writings of the monk Francesc Eiximenis; no, Falcones is not making this up! "Can these people really be your representatives?" asks Arnau of the Virgin of the Sea, the only mother he has ever known. Arnau's faith and goodness in the face of adversity speak eloquently for the reality of God, whose presence in this book is powerful in defending His true servants of all faiths, perhaps even especially when His earthly representatives betray Him.
7 of 8 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
The Lower End of Historical Fiction,
This review is from: Cathedral of the Sea: A Novel (Paperback)
I have launched a literary venture into Spanish history and fiction because I will visit there in a few months. This novel was among those recommended to me on a travel forum. I am sorry to report that I had to give up the book after several chapters. The style of writing is so choppy and the situations chosen by the author to develop his characters were so outlandish that I simply couldn't continue. Historical fiction can be a wonderful addition to travel preparation, but not in this case.
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