The Club Dumas

Rating:
Summary: Stunning & Original
Review: Lucas Corso is an unusual kind of private detective. He's "a mercenary of the book world," hunting down rare books for wealthy collectors. If that includes arranging for a theft and having confederates disguise the book's provenance, so be it. Corso knows all the angles.

In The Club Dumas, however, his latest case unexpectedly takes detours into violence and satanism. Corso has twin tasks: verifying the authenticity of a manuscript chapter of Dumas's The Three Musketeers and discovering whether a medieval volume, The Nine Doors, is a forgery. This book supposedly holds the secret of calling up Satan, and copies were burned during the Inquisition.

As he plumbs the murky depths of The Nine Doors and delves into the world of Alexander Dumas, Corso's case grows more and more phantasmagorical. He's stalked, beaten, becomes an accessory to murder, falls in love with a mysterious young woman who may be a devil, and becomes convinced someone has enmeshed him in a bizarre re- enactment of The Three Musketeers.

Critics have compared the author to Umberto Eco, but The Club Dumas lacks the heavy hand of the literary critic. It's a fast-paced, joyously complex and inventive book, imbued with a passion for literature. Prepare to be amused and amazed by this funny, bizarre set of puzzles within puzzles. And if you're a book lover, or have a special fondness for The Three Musketeers, this novel is an unforgettable feast.

Rating:
Summary: Boring book
Review: I picked this book because it took place in Spain and I have always been interested in Spain, but I could not even force myself to get through 50 pages of this book.

It is basically a book about this guy who hunts down rare books. Not very interesting if you ask me.

Rating:
Summary: Genial hasta la última letra
Review: El Club Dumás es una muestra clarísima del talento de su autor, un contemporáneo que se ha dedicado a ofrecernos buena literatura. En esta novela la aventura de su protagonista descubre un mundo en donde los libros son los verdaderos dueños del poder: capaces de dominar la vida misma. La caza de unos manuscritos son la excusa para que un estudioso de Dumas sea parte de otra intriga aún mayor, la del Club del cual no sabe socio...o al menos, no por su voluntad. Cada página es un misterio nuevo, y como en todos los libros de Pérez-Reverte, cualquier hipótesis que se haga el lector, estará equivocada. No queda otro camino que formar parte del Club Dumas.

Rating:
Summary: A Study In Boredom-A Weekend At The Club Dumas.
Review: While reading The Club Dumas it became painfully obvious why only seven people saw Johnny Depp's movie adaptation of the book. Slow and tedious in sections, I found myself wishing that I could cut my wrists with the pages to end the horror. What is ultimately the true source of frustration is that this book has so much potential. A deal with the devil, a mysterious vixen, an international search for a demonic book, ohhh, the wasted potential.Look elsewhere for a good read. I feel for those who judge this as an intellectual mystery. Please. In the end the bad guy all along is unmasked as... the evil mastermind! The mysterious girl is... mysterious! I would continue, but I must go translate my review into Spanish so as to save the readers of the Spanish version.

Rating:
Summary: A Book Noir
Review: If this was a movie, it would have to be filmed in black and white. It should star somebody dark and moody, like a young Marlon Brando. There should be a buxom blond, smarter than she looks, and a young athletic brunette, quiet and intense.

This book is a lot about looks; it's atmospheric, slow and steady paced. It's a book about books, where something strange is going on. It has scenes, not chapters, settings, not places.

Club Dumas reminds me of "The Magus", by John Fowles, in a strange way, especially near the end when there turns out to be ... just kidding. You'll have to read the book to find out. But "The Magus" borrowed a lot of content from Shakespeare's "The Tempest" and "Club Dumas" seems to draw content from several other books, and maybe "The Magus" is one of them, though it is not mentioned.

If you're a devotee' of film noir, or a lover of Alexandre Dumas (as am I, and I loved seeing a photo of him; I had no idea he was writing only 120 years ago, and that he was half-black), you might like this book. If you don't like books that are dark and moody and heavy on description and the supernatural, than I recommend against it.

Rating:
Summary: Even intellectual teasing is not fun.
Review: Let me start by classifying that I am giving this book two stars because the last two chapters rob the book of the true five-star rating that it deserves.

_The Club Dumas_ has an intriguing plot, a true bibliophile's pleasure with the intricate workings of _The Three Musketeers_, publishing techniques and forgery, shadowy hard-boiled style dialogue and atmospheres...it was a fantastic read. It's a fast read, with good suspenseful, page-turning fare, great intellectual mystery food for your brain...

And then the last two chapters came around. I will not give away the ending, but sufficeth to say, these two chapters rob the reader of -any- satisfaction that could have been acquired from the book. None, and I honestly mean -none-, of the plot lines are followed through, very few of the mystery's main mysteries are solved or even explained. The chapters completly destroyed any intellectual joy that I had gotten from the read.

The second to last chapter succeeds in telling you that you could have skipped 75% of the book because all of it was completely irrelevant. The last chapter attempts to tie up the other quarter of the book and fails.

I tried to give Perez-Reverte the benefit of the doubt and reasoned that we, like the main character, Corso, assume that all the parts in the story will eventually linked together into one picture. And that assumption is incorrect. Sure, give a point to the author for the tease, for showing us that not all mysteries should tie up so neatly. Then, take the point away because in proving this, the author delivers a serious disappointment to the reader. And it is a disappointment that will keep me away from his other books.

Rating:
Summary: Anti-climatic
Review: Like the Flanders Panel (by the same author), The Club Dumas has an original, engrossing story line but a terribly unsatisfying climax. For the first 300 pages I was immersed in the suspenseful plot only to be left hanging by the final 60 pages. I never quite understood who the girl was and how she tied into the story, and some of the characters actions were a little extreme and hard to accept based on the how the Dumas manuscript plot is resolved. The other plot line, The Nine Doors, is never resolved to my liking, and is horribly anti-climatic.

The author does a good job developing his characters, and even the extraneous people the protagonist meets added depth to the novel. The backdrop of old and original books, and the buyers and sellers who inhabit such was very interesting and gave the book just the right atmosphere.

Consequently, the build-up, the cast of characters, the wild tangents, and original plot make the book an engrossing read. Maybe, the author could find a collaborator, like Dumas had in The Club Dumas, to close out his fascinating tales with equally fascinating endings. Then the book would rate five stars.

Rating:
Summary: Intellectual froth tops off cool detective adventure
Review: If the novel THE CLUB DUMAS were a script pitch for a movie we might say it is ROSEMARY's BABY out of THE BIG SLEEP via RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARC. Lies, forgery, duplicity abound as does the mystery man, mystery woman, something seen, something half-remembered. Where am I? Is this happening? There's a scene in THE BIG SLEEP when Humphrey Bogart flips up the front brim of his usually cool fedora, puts on a pair of borrowed glasses, and enters a "rare book store" which fronts for a porno outlet. He tests the knowledge of the assistant in the book store by asking her for an non-existent esoteric rare edition of a well known historical text. She of course cannot answer one way or the other. THE BIG SLEEP is an excellent parallel for THE CLUB DUMAS in other areas as well - both have complicated plots, devious but beautiful females, cigarettes (The burning tip of his cigarette lit up his fingers in the darkness. He kept the smoke in his lungs as long as he could, then exhaled, watching the patterns it made in the segment of light above the bed.), a number of inexplicable murders, guns and wit (in one scene when making love our intrepid anti-hero Corso relates his temporary impotence to an historical military skirmish thus: " Very carefully he lay down next to her tanned, warm body waiting in the dark and used what the emperor, out on the muddy fields of Flanders, would have called an indirect-approach tactic - sizing up the terrain from the middle distance and making no contact in the critical zone. From a prudent distance he played for time in case Grouchy arrived with reinforcements; he caressed the girl and kissed her unhurriedly on the mouth and neck. But no luck. Grouchy was nowhere to be seen. The old fool was chasing Prussians miles from the battlefield." The protaginist in THE CLUB DUMAS, one Lucas Corso, is a (Bols) gin swilling, hip, book detective, who rarely takes a bath but who is not averse to making the beast back to back with leggy Lauren Bacall lookalikes. The minor characters too are worthy of THE BIG SLEEP. But there's more. If, dear reader, you too are are one who likes the look, touch, smell of books then THE CLUB DUMAS is a real treat as it spends considerable time covering aspects of literary history, and bookmaking esoterica. All of the above is topped off with an intellectual froth of point of view, authorial purpose, appearance and reality, and deja vu. A significant theme of the novel is the willingness of the reader to submit to the suspension of disbelief. Not to do so is to be a loser. Reading is a game. Thus it is a very serious activity, indeed, a character asserts that games are "the only serious activity." So if there is a thematic heart to this romp it is "if you want to play, you have no choice but to follow the rules. Only the person who respects rules, or at least knows and applies them, can win. Reading a book is the same: you have to accept the plot and the characters to enjoy the story." Dear reader, give yourself up to Arturo Prerez-Reverte and enjoy the story. It's quite an adventure.

Rating:
Summary: Plot and (unfortunately) then some.
Review: The plot of Club Dumas kept me turning the pages until the end. But because I found the characters and relationships unreal and annoying, I found myself skimming over those many scenes that were unimportant to the plot.

The plot involving lovers of books, lovers of reading, and lovers of both is involved and compelling. But I found the relationships, and especially the sex, filled with cliches and hardly necessary to the story.

Ultimately, the read was unsatifying and more of a time-killer. If you're looking for a book for a plane ride it might be the ticket though.

Rating:
Summary: The Mother of All Page-turners
Review: I can't say enough about what an incredible experience it was reading The Club Dumas. I picked this book up on a whim and couldn't put it down. I read the entire book on vacation in Puerto Rico and then searched endlessly for another Perez novel. The book is captivating--a cloak & dagger suspense involving a much sought after Dumas original manuscript, seedy homicidal "business partners," and a sequence of events that leads the reader through a series of perilous adventures--from the threat of human and supernatural demons, to the reality that you can't trust anyone, The Club Dumas offers a suspensful ride that makes you feel that you are actually involved! For any true bibliophile, this is the Holy Grail of books!