Pérez-Reverte, Arturo 1951-

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PÉREZ-REVERTE, Arturo 1951-

PERSONAL: Born November 24, 1951, in Cartagena, Spain. Hobbies and other interests: Sailing.

ADDRESSES: Agent—Harcourt Brace, 15 E. 26th St., New York, NY 10003; Alfaguara, Juan Bravo 38, 28006 Madrid, Spain.

CAREER: Journalist and author. War correspondent in African countries for the Pueblo; war correspondent for Spanish national television.

WRITINGS:

El húsar, Akal (Madrid, Spain), 1986.

El maestro de esgrima, Mondadori (Madrid, Spain), 1988, translation by Margaret Jull Costa published as The Fencing Master, Harcourt Brace (New York, NY), 1999.

La tabla de Flandes, Alfaguara (Madrid, Spain), 1990, translation by Margaret Jull Costa published as The Flanders Panel, Harcourt Brace (New York, NY), 1994, 1st paperback edition, Bantam Books (New York, NY), 1996.

El club Dumas, Santillana (Madrid, Spain), 1993, translation by Sonia Soto published as The Club Dumas, Harcourt Brace (New York, NY), 1996, 1st paperback edition, Vintage International (New York, NY), 1998.

La sombra del águila, Alfaguara (Madrid, Spain), 1993, new edition, Editorial Castalia (Madrid, Spain), 1999.

Territorio comanche: un relato, Ollero & Ramos (Madrid, Spain), 1994.

La piel del tambor (title means "The Skin of the Drum"), Santillana (Madrid, Spain), 1995, translation by Sonia Soto published as The Seville Communion, Harcourt Brace (New York, NY), 1998.

Los héroes cansados (collection), introduction by Santos Sanz Villanueva, Espasa Calpe (Madrid, Spain), 1995.

Obra breve (title means "Short Works"), Santillana (Madrid, Spain), 1995.

Patente de corso: 1993-1998, introduction and selection by José Luis Martín Nogales, Alfaguara (Madrid, Spain), 1998.

La carta esférica, Alfaguara (Madrid, Spain), 2000, translation by Margaret Sayers Peden published as The Nautical Chart, Harcourt (New York, NY), 2001.

"ADVENTURES OF CAPITÁN ALATRISTE" SERIES

El capitán Alatriste, Alfaguara (Madrid, Spain), 1996.

Limpieza de sangre, Alfaguara (Madrid, Spain), 1997.

El sol de Breda, Alfaguara (Madrid, Spain), 1998.

El oro del rey, Alfaguara (Madrid, Spain), 2000.

ADAPTATIONS: The Club Dumas was adapted for film as The Ninth Door, directed by Roman Polanski, 1999.

SIDELIGHTS: The Spanish novelist Arturo Pérez-Reverte may have been aided in his writing career by his popularity as a war correspondent and television personality, but it is his intelligence and literary acumen that have allowed him to remain a best-selling author in his native country and around the world. His novels have been translated into some nineteen languages and have sold more than three million copies. Five of his literary thrillers have been translated into English.

El maestro de esgrima, first released in 1988, was translated by Margaret Jull Costa as The Fencing Master, published in 1999. The tale is set in 1868 Madrid, where the fencing master Don Jaime Astarloa teaches his skill to young noblemen. He is approached by the beautiful Adela de Otero and offered a large sum of money to teach her his difficult secret sword thrust. He initially declines but her persistence outlasts his resolve. She soon improves on her already excellent swordmanship, and when a wealthy client who has taken Adela for his own is killed by Don Jaime's famous technique, she becomes a suspect. Barbara Hoffert of Library Journal called the novel "a fine tale of political intrigue with a lot of fencing lore deftly mixed in." A Publishers Weekly contributor commended Pérez-Reverte for his "lushly atmospheric suspense" and "spellbinding" prose that combines fencing, Spanish politics, and "the eternal lure of the femme fatale." Brad Hooper of Booklist explained that Don Jaime finally learns "what purpose his involuntary participation served—and this leads to a walloping ending."

The Flanders Panel, published in 1994, is a translation of Pérez-Reverte's 1990 novel La tabla de Flandes. It belongs to the genre of postmodern mysteries made popular by Italian author Umberto Eco, but in the opinion of the Times Literary Supplement's Michael Eaude, "Pérez-Reverte's plotting is much tighter and his narrative is more exciting." The novel's heroine, Julia, is an art restorer who discovers a murder mystery hidden in a medieval painting of a chess game. The game's moves are continued in the form of messages and events in Julia's life amid the Madrid art world; gradually, she realizes that she has become a target in the centuries-old mystery.

Discussing the book with reservations about its "undistinguished" prose style and stereotyped characters, Eaude maintained that "The Flanders Panel is never boring." The critic commended the way Pérez-Reverte worked background material, including chess moves, into the plot, and noted "a number of shocking twists." "Above all," Eaude concluded, "Pérez-Reverte makes use of a vivid imagination." Plaudits also came from a reviewer for the London Observer, who called the novel a "delightfully absorbing confection" and "ingenious hocus-pocus from start to finish." A Publishers Weekly contributor characterized the novel as "uneven but intriguing." That reviewer, like Eaude, faulted the characters as underdeveloped and also felt that the mystery was solved unconvincingly and conventionally. The reviewer responded most favorably to Pérez-Reverte's use of chess metaphors for human actions and to Julia's analyses of the painting, termed "clever and quite suspenseful."

Pérez-Reverte's most acclaimed novel is El club Dumas (1993), translated into English in 1997 as The Club Dumas. In this book, the author's proclivity for multi-layered wit is given full play. The novel revolves around a rare-book scout, Lucas Corso, who is asked to find the last two of the three existing copies of the Renaissance work The Book of the Nine Doors to the Kingdom of Shadows, in which each door is represented by an illustration that is crucial to Pérez-Reverte's plot. The murder of the owner of one copy in Portugal, and the theft of that volume's illustrations lead Corso and Irene Adler, an intriguing young woman who has been following him, to Paris in search of the third copy. As a favor to a bookseller friend, Corso has also taken on the job of verifying the authenticity of a manuscript, supposed to be Chapter 42 of Alexandre Dumas's The Three Musketeers. After many adventures, Corso finds himself caught up in the activities of a clandestine society known as the Club Dumas.

Margot Livesey of the New York Times Book Review wrote, "Mr. Pérez-Reverte . . . is extremely good on the business of book collecting. Among the pleasures of The Club Dumas is the intimate sense it conveys of this highly specialized type of commerce.... [He] does an admirable job of describing these bibliophiles, as well as of creating works like The Nine Doors, whose illustrations are reproduced and described in fascinating detail." A Times Literary Supplement reviewer reported, "Readers get, together with a mass of tables, diagrams, clues, decoys, and nudgings about intertextuality . . . all twenty-seven illustrations so that they can play spot-the-differences, and draw their own conclusions." The reviewer called The Club Dumas a "wayward and moderately enjoyable" mystery novel. Booklist contributor Brian Kenney labeled the novel "witty, suspenseful, and intellectually provocative." Although Livesey said she found herself "growing impatient" with some of the plot twists and narrative techniques, she called the book an "intelligent and delightful novel." The Club Dumas was adapted as the 1999 film The Ninth Door, starring the American actor Johnny Depp.

Pérez-Reverte's 1995 novel La piel del tambor, translated by Sonia Soto as The Seville Communion (1998), was noted by reviewers for its enjoyably skillful plotting, rich use of background information (including in this case a map of Seville, Spain), and intellectual gamesmanship. The premise of the narrative is that the secret files of the Vatican have been broken into by a computer hacker whose message implores the Pope to help save a seventeenth-century Seville church destined to be demolished. The church, it is said, "kills to defend itself." Father Lorenzo Quart, a tall, goodlooking priest-sleuth, is called in to investigate. Meanwhile, the parish priest, aided by an American nun, is fighting the corrupt real-estate developer who wants to build on the church site. Quart's self-discipline is challenged by the presence of a beautiful duchess whose estranged husband is a banker involved in the realestate deal.

A reviewer for the Economist called Pérez-Reverte "a master of intelligent suspense and reader-friendly action" and pointed out that this novel was "a hymn to Seville" and a work in which "postmodernistic tics do not interfere with a smoothly written, realist novel." Paul Baumann, in a review for the New York Times Book Review, called Quart "a St. James Bond, an agent in a Roman collar and handmade leather shoes who wields a Mont Blanc pen instead of a snub-nosed Beretta." Baumann found the novel "good fun," "entertaining," and sometimes "silly." A Publishers Weekly contributor commented, "Despite some unconvincing plotting and a few heavy-handed moments, Pérez-Reverte's characters capture the imagination." John Elson of Time called the book "one of those infrequent whodunits that transcend the genre." Baumann wrote, "Pérez-Reverte writes with wit, narrative economy, a sharp eye for the telling detail and a feel for history.... you'd have to be a remarkably faithless reader not to want to visit Seville after finishing this flavorful confection." Elson concluded that the novel "may well inspire readers to order round-trip tickets to an ancient city redolent of jasmine and orange blossoms."

La carta esférica comes from the author's lifelong love for the sea and sailing. Translated by Margaret Sayers Peden as The Nautical Chart, it involves an undersea treasure hunt for a fortune in emeralds amid the wreckage of a Jesuit ship sunk in the Mediterranean during the mid-eighteenth century. The protagonist, an exiled sailor named Manuel Coy, meets the beautiful Tanger Soto of Madrid's Naval Museum after she wins the bid for an old nautical map at an auction in Barcelona. Coy joins Soto in her search for the sunken treasure off the coast of Spain in the wreckage of the Dei Gloria. However, they encounter a group of sinister treasure seekers who want to stand in their way. As Coy falls in love with Soto, the reader begins to wonder whether she will betray him.

A Publishers Weekly contributor commented on the fact that the book was half over before the plot reached the sea but thought "the underwater sequences that climax the story are masterfully done." Bill Ott of Booklist wrote, "There is no universal meridian . . . when the course being charted attempts to penetrate the human heart." Ott wrote of Pérez-Reverte that he has "established himself as a master of the literary thriller" and "unfailingly melds a multifaceted tale of intrigue with characters of depth and dimension."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

Atlantic, September, 1994, p. 114.

Booklist, May 15, 1994, p. 1667; October 1, 1996, Brian Kenney, review of The Club Dumas, p. 292; February 1, 1999, Brad Hooper, review of The Fencing Master, p. 941; July, 2001, Bill Ott, review of The Nautical Chart, p. 1951; January 1 and 15, 2002, Editors' Choice 2001, review of The Nautical Chart, p. 762.

Books, September, 1994, p. 26; September, 1995, p. 25.

Book World, July 18, 1999, review of The Fencing Master, p. 15.

Economist, July 20, 1996, pp. 14-15.

Globe and Mail, June 19, 1999, review of The Fencing Master, p. D 12.

Kirkus Reviews, February 15, 1998, review of The Seville Communion, p. 218; April 1, 1999, review of The Fencing Master, p. 478; July 15, 2001, review of The Nautical Chart.

Library Journal, June 15, 1994, p. 96; September 1, 1996, p. 211; March 15, 1998, review of The Seville Communion, p. 95; March 15, 1999, Barbara Hoffert, review of The Fencing Master, p. 110.

Los Angeles Times Book Review, June 28, 1998, review of The Seville Communion, p. 7; September 5, 1999, reviews of The Seville Communion, The Flanders Panel, The Club Dumas, and The Fencing Master, p. 9.

Maclean's, June 21, 1999, review of The Fencing Master, p. 52.

New Yorker, April 27, 1998, review of The Seville Communion, p. 161.

New York Times Book Review, June 12, 1994, p. 42; December 4, 1994, p. 69; September 22, 1996, p. 40; March 23, 1997, Margot Livesey, "The Book Case," review of The Club Dumas, Late Edition, Final, Section 7, p. 10; May 3, 1998, Paul Baumann, "Holy Orders," review of The Seville Communion, Late Edition, Final, Section 7, p. 33; June 7, 1998, review of The Club Dumas, p. 36; May 23, 1999, review of The Seville Communion, p. 36; June 6, 1999, review of The Fencing Master, p. 26.

Observer (London), July 31, 1994, review of The Flanders Panel, p. 5B; March 7, 1999, review of The Fencing Master, p. 11.

People Weekly, May 12, 1997, p. 30.

Publishers Weekly, May 2, 1994, review of The Flanders Panel, p. 284; July 15, 1996, p. 23; November 18, 1996, p. 61; February 23, 1998, review of The Seville Communion, p. 49; March 1, 1999, review of The Fencing Master, p. 57; August 13, 2001, review of The Nautical Chart, p. 281.

Time, June 1, 1998, John Elson, review of The Seville Communion, p. 87; July 12, 1999, review of The Fencing Master, p. 77.

Times Educational Supplement, December 29, 1995, p. 12.

Times Literary Supplement, August 12, 1994, Michael Eaude, review of The Flanders Panel, p. 23; September 6, 1996, review of The Club Dumas, p. 23; July 24, 1998, review of The Seville Communion, p. 21; December 4, 1998, review of Patente de corso: 1993-1998, p. 8; April 9, 1999, review of The Fencing Master, p. 27.

Translation Review Supplement, December, 1999, review of The Fencing Master, p. 33.