The Nautical Chart [Paperback]

The fifth novel from the much acclaimed Spanish literary magician Arturo Pérez-Reverte, The Nautical Chart, is (the subtitle tells us) "a novel of adventure", and this vivid and colourful tale of lost treasure, love and betrayal on the high seas is a work that conjures the shade of past masters of nautical adventure. Conrad, Melville and Stevenson are in this heady brew, but not one of those masters ever produced something quite as rich and strange as Pérez-Reverte's utterly individual narrative--although it certainly won't be to every taste.

A beautiful woman named Tánger Soto is at the centre of The Nautical Chart. Nearly 230 years after it went to the bottom, Tánger has uncovered the location of a brigantine called the Dei Gloria, a significant ship of the Jesuit brethren's fleet sunk by pirates in the 17th century. Working for the Naval Museum in Madrid, she keeps her discovery clandestine until she is able to enlist the aid of the laconic seaman Manuel Coy at a maritime auction in Barcelona. He is persuaded to join her on a wild treasure hunt off the southern coast of Spain, fully aware that this is much more than a simple search-and-recover mission, and that Tánger is as full of secrets as the sunken vessel they are tracking down. Coy is a suspended sailor with nothing to do, a mariner without a ship. Tánger utilises her singular manipulative skills with men and her expertise with documents, atlases, and nautical maps to chart the search for the lost treasure. Coy is bewitched by his fiercely determined companion, and before long finds himself falling in love. Along with El Piloto, the canny old man of the sea whose sailboat they chart, they head into perilous seas that promise fortune--or death.

The plotting of this mélange of mystery, love and betrayal is an ever-surprising crossbreed between the adventure tale and the literary novel, constantly (and delightfully) wrong-footing the reader at every turn. Pérez-Reverte utilises his experience as a television journalist who has reported on some of the world's most dangerous crises to ensure that the reader's pulse is often racing, but (as in such earlier novels as The Seville Communion and The Fencing Master it's his powerfully evocative prose that commands our attention. --Barry Forshaw --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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.

A suspended sailor and a gorgeous woman who works at Madrid's Naval Museum join forces to uncover a sunken galleon and find themselves in hot water. From the author of intellectual thrillers like The Flanders Panel.
Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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.
- Barbara Hoffert, "Library Journal"
Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

*Starred Review* Through four novels, Perez-Reverte has established himself as a master of the literary thriller. Whether his subject is chess (The Flanders Panel, 1994), rare books (The Club Dumas, 1996), the Vatican (The Seville Communion, 1998), or fencing (The Fencing Master, 1999), and whether his focus is contemporary or historical (often it is both, with overlapping plots), he unfailingly melds a multifaceted tale of intrigue with characters of depth and dimension. There is always an internal drama as well as an external one, and the richness of detail, both historical and personal, is never set decoration but always relates in a complex way to the characters and their situations. All that is true again in his latest effort, which addresses a new and rich topic: sunken treasure. Serving out a bogus disciplinary action, Coy is a sailor without a ship, as uncomfortable on land as he is calm at sea, which may account for his willingness to join Tanger Soto of the Madrid Naval Museum in her search for the Dei Gloria, a Jesuit ship sunk by pirates in the seventeenth century. With the help of the antique nautical chart of the title, Soto has pinpointed the location of the ship off the southern coast of Spain, but she needs a sailor to get her there and to help her outwit (and outfight) the rival treasure hunters also on the trail. It's much more complicated than that, of course, with layers of deception and betrayals within betrayals affecting both the search and the interpersonal dynamics. Adept as ever at mixing historical and contemporary material, Perez-Reverte takes his genrebending to another level this time by merging the swashbuckling spirit of the best sea adventures with an introspective, philosophical meditation on the idea of navigation. There is no universal meridian, Coy is forced to conclude, when the course being charted attempts to penetrate the human heart. Bill Ott
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

"a virtually perfect fusion of absorbing action and precise, intricate characterization...A classic of its genre..." -- Kirkus Reviews, July 15, 2001 --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Coy is a suspended sailor without a ship. At an auction in Barcelona, he meets a beautiful woman obsessed with the Dei Gloria, a Jesuit ship sunk by pirates in the seventeenth century. Tnger uses her considerable skills with men and her expertise with atlases and nautical maps to search for the ship's rumored lost treasure. Coy is quickly drawn into the search, and finds himself falling in love as they seek their fortune together. Or do they? Their journey becomes dangerous. Does the treasure really exist? Are there secrets dwelling in the depths of the sea? And what of the depths of the heart? This suspensefully plotted novel combines the richness of atmosphere we have come to expect from Arturo Prez-Reverte with the addictive romance and mystery of the sea. A riveting read, it is an unforgettable adventure.

"With his chess-like plots and mysterious characters, Arturo Prez-Reverte has established himself as the master of the intellectual thriller, a reputation again confirmed with The Nautical Chart."--Chicago Tribune Coy is a suspended sailor without a ship. At an auction in Barcelona, he meets a beautiful woman obsessed with the Dei Gloria, a Jesuit ship sunk by pirates in the seventeenth century. Tnger uses her considerable skills with men and her expertise with atlases and nautical maps to search for the ship's rumored lost treasure. Coy is quickly drawn into her search and finds himself falling in love as they seek their fortune together-or do they? This masterfully plotted novel combines richness of atmosphere with the addictive romance and mystery of the sea. It is an unforgettable adventure. Internationally acclaimed author Arturo Prez-Reverte was born in 1951 in Spain, where he lives. His bestselling books have been translated into nineteen languages in thirty countries and have sold millions of copies. --This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.

Arturo Prez-Reverte is an internationally acclaimed author and his books have been translated into nineteen languages in thirty countries and sold more than three million copies worldwide. He was born in 1951 in Spain, where he still lives.

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 glasses 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 Martimo de las Costas de Espaa, 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 paine