The Nautical Chart [Paperback]

Arturo Perez-Reverte (Author), Margaret Sayers Peden (Translator)

Book Description

Publication Date: June 7, 2004

Coy is a sailor without a ship.Tánger Soto is a woman with an obsession to find the Dei Gloria, a ship sunk during the seventeenth century, and El Piloto is an old man with the sailboat on which all three set out to seek their fortune together. Or do they?

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

A treasure hunt for a Jesuit ship sunk by pirates off the coast of Spain is the plot on which Perez-Reverte's new novel turns, but a love story is the real heart of this nicely crafted, carefully told adventure. A suspended sailor happens on a maritime auction in Barcelona, where he meets the beautiful Tanger Soto, a museum curator whose winning bid buys her a 17th-century atlas that may reveal the final resting place of the Dei Gloria. Coy, the sailor, is totally smitten, so it's no surprise that he signs on to help Tanger track the sunken ship to its grave in waters he's sailed since childhood. Enlisting the aid of a diver friend, Coy and Tanger stay a few steps ahead of the crooked salvagers who've been trying to get the atlas, outmaneuvering the attempts on their lives and the efforts to keep them from the treasure. Perez-Reverte (The Fencing Master, The Club Dumas) is better at plumbing the mysteries of the human heart than those of the sea, but The Nautical Chart manages to combine history, suspense, and obsessive love in a slow-paced but ultimately engrossing read. --Jane Adams --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Publishers Weekly

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.

--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 480 pages
• Publisher: Mariner Books (June 7, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0156029820
• ISBN-13: 978-0156029827
• Product Dimensions: 8 x 5.3 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 14.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (82 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #486,069 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

40 of 43 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Unlike His Other Work 3.5 Stars, September 24, 2001

By 

taking a rest - See all my reviews
(HALL OF FAME REVIEWER)   

This review is from: The Nautical Chart (Hardcover)

Mr. Perez Reverte's previous books have always maintained a level of tension throughout the unfolding mystery. He has always brought well-planned and complex tales that revolved around great literature, great art, or even the art of classic sport, as he did with, "The Fencing Master". He always has piqued the curiosity of the inquisitive reader from the outset of his tale, and while sharing pieces of the outcome as the story progressed; he never pulled the curtain entirely back until the very end. "The Nautical Chart", is a very good story, however the author takes too long to tell his tale, and while he provides an ending that unfolds to the very end, unlike his other works this one can be seen clearly if not completely well before the close.

Throughout the book there is a great amount of detail regarding the operation of 18th century sailing vessels. As the reader progresses with the story there is no way of knowing how critical this information may be. The frustration arises as only those readers with very specialized knowledge of sailing and its terminology will be able to follow the reconstruction of the tales within the tale. I don't see why a few drawings of the craft in question could not have been provided. The detail would have enhanced the read, and kept the pace more brisk as those without the knowledge would not feel left out, and wonder how much they were missing.

The main players are hard to like as well, as for the most part they loathe one another. One is particularly annoying as he seems to go through his days confirming his and everyone else's low expectations of him, and he catalogues it all with acronyms. There just was not as much substance and depth to these characters as the author has delivered in the past. Virtually all are driven by the same base motive, and even that is hard to get involved with.

I love this author's work, however of the novels he has written to date, this is the one I favor the least. I certainly will once again pick up his next work, and I look forward to the tales that are of the caliber of his first four novels.

23 of 26 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Good book? Poor translation?, May 13, 2002

By 

Patrick Burnett "penngos" (San Francisco, CA USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Nautical Chart (Hardcover)

Someone once said of Peter DeVries, "I love his book. I read it every time he writes it." Arturo Perez-Reverte has cemented his claim to such backhanded praise with this release, "The Nautical Chart".

This book follows the standard Perez-Reverte formula, one that became almost tiresome after "The Flanders Panel" was released.

Here we are offered Coy, a down-on-his-luck sailor with barely enough knowledge to get the job done, a man who thinks and acts with his fists as opposed to his wits, Tanger Soto, a single-minded femme fatale who echoes Hammett's Bridget O'Shaughnessy (from "The Maltese Falcon", which this book references and echoes)and a pair of villains as cruel and unlikely as Gutman and Joel Cairo. The group are all in search of a vast treasure buried beneath the sea centuries ago. That's pretty much all there is to the story.

It's not the repeat of the old formula that bothers me so, rather it is the change in writing style that seems to have sucked the joy out of my reading of Perez-Reverte, and I don't know whether to blame this on the author or his translater. Former translator Sonia Soto had a flair for language and helped ease The Club Dumas and The Flanders Panel into the American consciousness by imbuing these books with a fluid formality that seemed just right for the content. New translator Margaret Sayers Peden has a wooden ear, seemingly translating some sections exactly as written (which makes them seem odd and flat to an English speaker) and others by trying to inject modern slang and make the book sound more contemporary.

It is a fact that, unless we read the original language, we are at the mercy of the translator when reading foreign literature. A good one can make the work sing and a bad one will make it squawk. Sadly, without a strong, fresh framework from Perez-Reverte, this translation merely squawks.

11 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Engaging, but not Amazing, February 28, 2002

By 

A. Ross (Washington, DC) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (HALL OF FAME REVIEWER)    (TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Nautical Chart (Hardcover)

Perez-Reverte's literary mysteries, as wonderful and entertaining as they tend to be, all follow a somewhat similar template, one that is faithfully reproduced here. It all starts with a somewhat highbrow subject-chess and painting restoration in The Flanders Panel, antiquarian books in The Club Dumas, the Vatican and Catholicism in The Seville Communion, fencing in the Fencing Master-which is represented here by cartography and sailing. Then he adds a hero who is an expert in the subject, and somewhat of a loner, removed from the mundane world around him or her. The expert/hero is activated by powerful persons whose interest in the hero's area of expertise is ultimately revealed to be linked to some murky historical episode which proves vital to the story. And finally there is a ending that is often surprising or ambiguous. That this template works over and over is a testament both to the skill with which Pérez-Reverte weaves his plots, and to his ability to carry the reader deep into the details of whatever subject happens to be the focus of that book.

In this book, Pérez-Reverte presents a fairly compelling hero, Coy, a born to the ocean, jazz loving sailor at loose ends. He's quickly embroiled in a treasure hunt led by the beautiful and always in control Tanger, who's in a race with a slimy Gibralterian professional treasure hunter and his sadistic Argentine dwarf enforcer. Simpler than any of his previous books, the story both directly and indirectly references the Dashed Hammett classic, The Maltese Falcon. As in that tale, most of the suspense is created by lack of information, which is slowly released to Coy in dribs and drabs, as well as the question of who's double-crossing who. This makes the main characters conversations a shade too melodramatic at times to be realistic, but this is balanced by his naunced capturing of Coy's total attraction to Tanger and her manipulation of it.

As so much of the book involves Coy and Tanger crouched over old maps, or discussing them, one wishes the publisher would have included some reproductions to help the reader out. Similarly, it would have helped a great deal to have an illustration of the two maint ships being hunted for, as there are pages upon pages describing their duel. This is rather frustrating, as without some basic knowledge of sailing and its terms, the reader is unlikely to be able to follow chunks of the writing. The book takes a bit too long to get going, although when it does, it is quite suspenseful, although the clues are a little more visible than usual in Pérez-Reverte's work. Unfortunately the ending doesn't live up to its buildup, and one suspects this eminently filmable thriller will have its climax tweaked for the big screen. All in all, it's not among his best, but still entertaining and highly readable.