The Nautical Chart
Written by Arturo Pérez-Reverte
Narrated by George Guidall
4/5
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About this audiobook
Arturo Pérez-Reverte
Arturo Pérez-Reverte is the #1 internationally bestselling author of many critically acclaimed novels, including The Club Dumas, The Queen of the South, and The Siege, which won the International Dagger Award from the Crime Writers’ Association. A retired war journalist, he lives in Madrid and is a member of the Royal Spanish Academy. His books have been translated into more than forty languages and have been adapted to the big screen.
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Reviews for The Nautical Chart
15 ratings12 reviews
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5It's tautly written and compelling but in the end I felt it had a slightly misogynistic overtone. Lots of nice details about navigation and treasure hunting.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5I had a hard time getting into this book - the writer has a very elaborate, expressive way of writing and, I felt, over-described every minute detail. Once I settled into his unique style, however, I did enjoy the book. I finallly 'got into it' after about 350 of the 466 pages and I'm glad I stuck with it. There were several twists and turns and I was surprised by the final outcome. Though I felt he could've condensed this work into half of its size, I'm glad I got through to the end. It was a nice mix of history, geography, romance, adventure, and maritime journey.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5A curious mixture of noir thriller, Tintin adventure and Moby-Dick. Perez-Reverte seems to be playing around with that most Spanish of subjects, the collision between real life and the romance of adventure stories. A heroine who can't make her mind up whether she's Mary Astor in The Maltese Falcon or a boy reporter with a quiff is confronted with a hero made up of equal parts of Lord Jim, Captain Haddock and Popeye, and they go hunting for sunken treasure in 1990s Spain. It sounds absurd, and the concept isn't helped by P-R’s habitual weakness for the worst noir clichés (the fist-fights, the sip-by-sip and blow-by-blow descriptions of every drink and cigarette, the mind-numbing misogyny of it all). But I have to confess to getting a good deal of pleasure out of it. Maybe some of that came from reading it in the original and having to puzzle out all the Spanish nautical terminology, but there is also something curiously appealing about the character of the sailor who still hasn't quite fallen out of love with the sea.
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5An enjoyable story but not totally engrossing and at times the writing is a little more intricate than it needs to be making it hard work in parts. Not what I'd describe as a page turner but there was no way I was going to give up on it either.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5After reading Captain Alatriste earlier in the year, I felt overdue to revisit one of Perez-Reverte’s more contemporary novels. This one isn’t quite in the league of The Flanders Panel or The Club Dumas, but it was very enjoyable. The story revolves around a sailor who has been barred from his naval career due to an unfortunate incident at sea. Attending an auction, he witnesses a curious bidding war over a very old nautical chart. Soon he is entangled with a femme fatale who thinks she has the inside track to a bountiful treasure lost at sea several hundred years ago.As always, Perez-Reverte manages to weave considerable research into the story quite effortlessly. He just threads it into the action so you hardly notice how much you’re learning. Here we learn much of the nuances of a sailor’s life as well as a subtle history of mapmaking. So this is a good page-turner that will teach you a few things. But if you’re unconvinced, start with his other two books that I mentioned.
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Audio. Fun Made it to the end. Not much more to say.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Coy, a sailor down on his luck meet Tanger Soto, a mysterious scholar who needs him to help search for a shipwreck. He falls for Tanger and ends up involved in a search for the ship and a treasure that may or may not be on board. A romance develops even as Coy learns that Tanger may be using him for his ability to navigate in dangerous waters. This story is set in Spain and contains lots of Spanish history. Almost a combination of Clive Cussler and Alistair Maclean. There's a lot of detail about navigation and the Jesuits and meridians. Not so much a mystery as a thriller.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Well written suspense novel about a team of modern day ship scavengers. takes place off the Spanish coast. Well researched and exciting.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Another decent one from Perez-Reverte, but not the best.
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5The seafarin' adventure and noir combine in this tale of a melancholy sailor, an enigmatic blonde, a 200-year-old shipwreck, and a passel of bad guys who also want to find the ship.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5No time for more than a brief note, alas.
Coy is a sailor confined to land for a couple of years because he accidentally ran a ship aground. He's lured by lovely museum curator Tanger into the search for a Jesuit ship that sank/was sunk in the late 18th century, and for its cargo of precious emeralds. As the tale slowly unfolds we're treated to a myriad smaller stories of Coy's earlier adventures among other men for whom, like him, the land seems a foreign territory and the sea their only possible home.
This longish text demands that you immerse yourself in it, that you invest in time in it; it's not really amenable to being read in ten-minute chunks grabbed here and there as other activities permit. If you're looking for rip-roaring, pulse-pounding action, this isn't for you (although there's some of that in it), but I found it entirely engrossing nonetheless -- it was a wrench to put it down each time I had to.
Margaret Sayers Peden's respectful translation serves the book well. Every now and then I was reminded, by an odd turn of phrase or some infelicuty, that this was a translation, but that occurred no more than a handful of times during the book; otherwise, the narrative read with great style. - Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Enjoyable read. Different. Excellent writing. Recommend for those who enjoy adventure tales.