The Club Dumas
By Arturo Perez-Reverte
Translated from the Spanish by Sonio Soto
Review by George Cowmeadow Bauman
Satanic manuscripts. French history. Murder. The European antiquarian book world. Sex. The Club Dumas has it all, and Spanish author Arturo Perez-Reverte skillfully weaves these themes into a suspenseful and unpredictable novel that has echoes of Umberto Eco's The Name of the Rose and John Dunning's books.
Lucas Corso is a European book scout. Not the kind who buys quarter books at thrift shops and sells to dealers for a dollar, but a knowledgeable, dirty-handed, fast-talking mercenary that high-end antiquarian booksellers in Milan, Paris, London, Barcelona, and Lausanne turn to when the unobtainable manuscript or first edition just has to be had -- by whatever means necessary.
The reader learns much about nineteenth century popular French literature as Corso is approached to authenticate what seems to be a handwritten chapter from the manuscript of The Three Musketeers by Alexandre Dumas. It seems as though that serial novel's characters come alive to confuse Corso. Dumas, his characters, and his writings (and are they really HIS writings?) are near the center of this mystery.
Simultaneously Corso is hired as a book detective by a collector/bookseller of occult literature to verify the authenticity of an ancient illustrated satanic manuscript, for purposes that may not be of this world.
Inexplicably a beautiful young woman soon begins following, then accompanying, Corso as he country-hops in pursuit of rare manuscripts and rarer information. She's there to help him, is all she'll say. And her name is Irene Adler, from 223B Baker Street, London.
How these two trails of continental book detection intertwine involve Corso and the reader in a labyrinthine puzzle that jeopardizes not only lives, but souls. An observation by the narrator -- one of Corso's "employers" -- applies to books, and to this plot: "In literature there are never any clear boundaries. Everything is dependent on everything else, and one thing is superimposed on top of another. It all ends up as a complicated intertextual game."
Perez-Reverte artistically word-sketches detailed scenes that you experience as though you were there: while one-eyed, moss-covered garden statues look on, a destitute Portuguese book collector wanders his dilapidated mansion, playing a haunting violin lament into the shadow-filled night, summoning the ghosts of his lost books.
I reveled in this cryptic book so much that I immediately went to a secondhand bookstore for a copy of The Three Musketeers. And to find Perez-Reverte's earlier book, The Flanders Panel.
Good books usually beget other good books.
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