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Narrated by George Guidall
Arturo Pérez-ReverteUnabridged — 17 hours, 54 minutes
Narrated by George Guidall
Arturo Pérez-ReverteUnabridged — 17 hours, 54 minutes
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International best-selling author Arturo Perez-Reverte, a celebrated master of smart, gripping thrillers, draws favorable comparisons to such literary legends as Herman Melville, Joseph Conrad, and Patrick O'Brian. Translated into 19 languages, his books have sold more than three million copies worldwide.
At a maritime auction in Barcelona, Merchant Marine officer Manuel Coy sees an intense bidding war erupt over a seemingly innocuous 18th-century atlas. The auction winner is the beautiful Tanger Soto, who is obsessed with a Jesuit ship sunk by pirates in the 17th century. Joining forces, Tanger and Manuel hit the seas in search of Dei Gloria and its precious, yet unidentified, cargo. Their quest sends them not only into dangerous waters, but also into the perilous recesses of the human heart.
Full of adventure and suspense, The Nautical Chart is a masterful romance of the sea. George Guidall's thrilling reading makes for an unforgettable listening experience.
Deprived of a ship, a mariner's mind turns naturally to women, so perhaps it's not surprising that sailor Coy deals with a suspension by becoming ensnared with a gorgeous fortune hunter who works at the Naval Museum in Madrid. Her scheme to retrieve a 17th-century sunken treasure lures Coy into very deep waters indeed. But Perez-Reverte teaches us that in reading, enthrallment is its own reward.
The Nautical Chart is a sea story told as a sailor might, off duty on the deck of his ship. With appreciation for character and detail. With keen command of pacing and no need to rush. Like any good storyteller, writer or musician, Perez-Reverte makes eye contact to be certain that he's got hold of you.
— Los Angeles Times
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 T nger Soto, of Madrid's Museo Naval; the ponytailed man is a famed pirate of sea salvage, Nino Palermo. Coy comes to T nger'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. P?rez-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 P?rez-Reverte at his best, but his second-best will be more than good enough for most readers. A firstprinting of 125,000 copies and a five-city author tour are in the works. Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.
Spanish master Perez-Reverte has a streamlined approach to novel writing: he takes a recherch subject say, fencing or rare books and uses it to construct a story rich in suspense, detail, and character study. The territory he covers in his latest work (after The Fencing Master) is in fact the deep blue sea. Coy, a sailor suspended for two years from the Merchant Marine, becomes infatuated with a mysterious woman named T nger Soto he encounters at an auction. There she has successfully bid on an old maritime atlas that will guide her to the Dei Gloria, a Jesuit ship downed in the Mediterranean in the 18th century. Soon T nger has drawn Coy into her scheme, which pits them against a thug named Palermo and his sidekick dwarf. All the elements are here for another literate thriller from Perez-Reverte, but this work is surprisingly less effective than its predecessors. The set-up is intriguing and the ending persuasively suspenseful, but in the middle stretches a long, becalmed section that dwells tediously on maritime detail and on Coy's endless seesawing as he considers whether to trust the obviously treacherous T nger. Perhaps those with a taste for the sea will be more drawn in; otherwise, this should work primarily for larger thriller collections. [Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 6/1/01.] Barbara Hoffert, "Library Journal" Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.
This marvelous thriller-a seafaring mystery that pointedly evokes the immortal romances of Melville, Stevenson, and Conrad-is the fifth (and best) fiction in English translation yet from the very popular Spanish author of The Club Dumas (1997) and The Seville Communion (1998). Its plot is skillfully and quickly set in motion when Merchant Marine officer Manuel Coy a thoughtful, bookish (though "not intellectual") loner who is confined to land following a shipwreck that had occurred during his watch, attends an auction of "naval objects" in Barcelona. Coy observes a tense bidding war over a seemingly obscure 18th-century atlas, and later follows its winner, a beautiful blond woman named Tanger Soto, to the Madrid museum where she works as a researcher. He's eventually enlisted in her search for the wreck of the Dei Gloria, a brigantine owned by Jesuit brethren (and carrying an undisclosed precious cargo) that had been sunk in 1767, probably by a pursuing pirate ship, off the southern coast of Spain. Perez-Reverte paces his tale expertly, shifting its focus among the dangers that threaten Tanger's undertaking (including a sinister "treasure hunter" and his "menacing dwarf" hireling, a former Argentinean death-squad mercenary), Coy's helpless fixation on the mystery woman who simultaneously reels him in and keeps him at bay, and an impressive wealth of nautical and navigational technique and lore. The story takes a dazzling turn 100 pages from its end, when its omniscient narrator "introduces" himself (along with other, even more crucial revelations), and ends up smashingly, with a "tragicomedy of betrayals" that underscore the embittered Coy's resemblance to the resigned, burnt-outcharacters of (his favorite author) Joseph Conrad: "weary heroes, . . . aware of the danger of dreaming when at the helm." In a virtually perfect fusion of absorbing action and precise, intricate characterization, Perez-Reverte magically sustains the tension and suspense over a span of almost 500 pages. A classic of its genre, equal to the best of Eric Ambler and Patrick O'Brian-and, beyond genre, not far below the levels and depths plumbed by Melville and Conrad themselves. First printing of 125,000; author tour
PRAISE FOR THE FENCING MASTER
"[Párez-Reverte] has a deft way with a sword fight, and there are duels here as swashbuckling as anything in The Mask of Zorro."
—The New York Times Book Review
"A smart, literate novel with suspense and a great puzzle, this is hard to beat."
—The Globe and Mail (Toronto)
PRAISE FOR THE SEVILLE COMMUNION
"One of those infrequent whodunits that transcend the genre . . . Page-turning pace and vivid characters." —Time
"Spain's bestselling author weaves an indelible tale of love, faith and greed that will keep readers shouting olé!" —People
"Dramatic extravagance . . . Párez-Reverte writes with narrative economy, a sharp eye for telling detail and a feel for history. . . . Good fun." —The New York Times Book Review
PRAISE FOR THE FLANDERS PANEL
"Párez-Reverte is a master storyteller. His story within a story is fascinating in its detail. His characters become so lifelike that they feel like old friends. And the plot is refreshingly creative." —San Francisco Examiner
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| BN ID: | 2940170557202 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Recorded Books, LLC |
| Publication date: | 07/27/2012 |
| Edition description: | Unabridged |
From Chapter 1
Lot 307
"I have swum through oceans and sailed through libraries." --Herman Melville, Moby Dick
We could call him Ishmael, but in truth his name is Coy. I met him in the next-to-last act of this story, when he was on the verge of becoming just one more shipwrecked sailor floating on his coffin as the whaler Rachel looked for lost sons. By then he had already been drifting some, including the afternoon when he came to the Claymore auction gallery in Barcelona with the intention of killing time. He had a small sum of money in his pocket and, in a room in a boardinghouse near the Ramblas, a few books, a sextant, and a pilot's license that four months earlier the head office of the Merchant Marine had suspended for two years, after the Isla Negra, a forty-thousand ton container ship, had run aground in the Indian Ocean at 04:20 hours...on his watch.
Coy liked auctions of naval objects, although in his present situation he was in no position to bid. But Claymore's, located on a first floor on calle Consell de Cent, was air-conditioned and served drinks at the end of the auction, and besides, the young woman at the reception desk had long legs and a pretty smile. As for the items to be sold, he enjoyed looking at them and imagining the stranded sailors who had been carrying them here and there until they were washed up on this final beach. All through the session, sitting with his hands in the pockets of his dark-blue wool jacket, he kept track of the buyers who carried off his favorites. Often this pastime was disillusioning. A magnificent diving suit, whose dented and gloriously scarred copper helmet made him think of shipwrecks, banks of sponges and Negulesco's films with giant squid and Sophia Loren emerging from the water with her wet blouse plastered to her body, was acquired by an antique dealer whose pulse never missed a beat as he raised his numbered paddle. And a very old Browne & Son handheld compass, in good condition and in its original box, for which Coy would have given his soul during his days as an apprentice, was awarded, without any change in the opening price, to an individual who looked as if he knew absolutely nothing about the sea; that piece would sell for ten times its value if it were displayed in the window of any maritime sporting-goods shop.
The fact is, that afternoon the auctioneer hammered down lot 306-a Ulysse Nardin chronometer used in the Italian Regia Marina-at the opening price, consulting his notes as he pushed up his spectacles with his index finger. He was suave, and was wearing a salmon-colored shirt and a rather dashing necktie. Between bids he took small sips of a glass of water.
"Next lot: Atlas Marítimo de las Costas de España, the work of Urrutia Salcedo. Number three oh seven."
He accompanied the announcement with a discreet smile saved for pieces whose importance he meant to highlight. An eighteenth-century jewel of cartography, he added after a significant pause, emphasizing the word "jewel" as if it pained him to release it. His assistant, a young man in a blue smock, held up the large folio volume so it could be seen from the floor, and Coy looked at it with a stab of sadness. According to the Claymore catalogue, it was rare to find this edition for sale, since most of the copies were in libraries and museums. This one was in perfect condition. Most likely it had never been on a ship, where humidity, penciled notations, and natural wear and tear left their irreparable traces on navigational charts.
The auctioneer was opening the bidding at a price that would have allowed Coy to live for a year in relative comfort. A man with broad shoulders, a clear brow, and long gray hair pulled back into a ponytail, who was sitting in the first row and whose cell phone had rung three times, to the irritation of others in the room, held up his paddle, number 11. Other hands went up as the auctioneer, small wooden gavel in hand, turned his attention from one to another, his modulated voice repeating each offer and suggesting the next with professional monotony. The opening price was about to be doubled, and prospective buyers of lot 307 began dropping by the wayside. Joining the corpulent individual with the gray ponytail in the battle was another man, lean and bearded, a woman-of whom he could see only the back of a head of short blond hair and the hand raising her paddle-and a very well-dressed bald man. When the woman doubled the initial price, gray ponytail half-turned to send a miffed glance in her direction, and Coy glimpsed green eyes, an aggressive profile, a large nose, and an arrogant expression. The hand holding his paddle bore several gold rings. The man gave the appearance of not being accustomed to competition, and he turned to his right brusquely, where a dark-haired, heavily made-up young woman who had been murmuring into the phone every time it rang was now suffering the consequences of his bad humor. He rebuked her harshly in a low voice.
"Do I hear a bid?"
Gray ponytail raised his hand, and the blonde woman immediately counterattacked, lifting her paddle, number 74. That caused a stir in the room. The lean bearded man decided to withdraw, and after two new raises the bald, well-dressed man began to waver. Gray ponytail raised the bidding, and caused new frowns in his vicinity when his phone rang once again. He took it from the hand of his secretary and clamped it between his shoulder and his ear; at the same time his free hand shot up to respond to the bid the blonde had just made. At this point in the contest, the entire room was clearly on the side of the blonde, hoping that ponytail would run out of either money or phone batteries. The Urrutia was now at triple the opening price, and Coy exchanged an amused glance with the man in the next seat, a small dark-haired man with a thick mustache and hair slicked back with gel. His neighbor returned the look with a courteous smile, placidly crossing his hands in his lap and twirling his thumbs. He was small and fastidious, almost prissy, and had melancholy, appealing, slightly bulging eyes, like frogs in fairy tales. He wore a red polka-dot bow tie and a hybrid, half Prince of Wales, half Scots tartan jacket that gave him the outlandishly British air of a Turk dressed by Burberry.
"Do I have a higher bid?"
The auctioneer held his gavel high, his inquisitive eyes focused on gray ponytail, who had handed the cell phone back to his secretary and was staring at him with annoyance. His latest bid, exactly three times the original price, had been covered by the blonde, whose face Coy, more and more curious, could not see no matter how hard he tried to peer between the heads in front of him. It was difficult to guess whether it was the bump in the bidding that was perturbing ponytail or the woman's brassy competitiveness.
Copyright © 2000, Arturo Pérez-Reverte. English translation copyright © 2001 by Margaret Sayers, published by Harcourt, Inc.
