Le Vin D’Anjou
July 9, 2007 by Elijah
I generally try to avoid going on too much about a book that I’m in the middle of (thereby leaving more for me to say when I actually review it) but I have to say that The Club Dumas by Arturo Pérez-Reverte is off to a monumentally good start in my opinion. (Since I quote the book in my own about page, I figured that reading it was a good idea.)
The novel is a modern-day mystery, set in the world of book collectors, with a strong emphasis on the works of a certain classic author who happens to be my favorite of all time. It’s an interesting book to begin after having finished The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay just the night before, as both are more current genres dealing with the escapist classics of yesteryear. Not that I think the two books will be all that similar once all is said and done.
The fact is, I’m not very far into The Club Dumas at all just yet–but I had to share the giddy joys of the first few pages. When, within the first few pages, two characters meet and ingratiate themselves to one another by quoting the beginning of Sabatini’s Scaramouche (”He was born with a gift of laughter and a sense that the world was mad. And that was all his patrimony.”) it certainly gives me the feeling that a book was written for me. When the characters go on to discuss many of the more obscure sources to Dumas’ Three Musketeers I find myself grinning stupidly, even when I already know the bulk of those facts.
(That whoever translated The Club Dumas from the original Spanish clearly didn’t bother to actually look up Scaramouche and therefore translated what had gone from English to Spanish back into English with words that were different than Sabatini’s, cannot be held against the book.)
So, frankly and simply, not even 30 pages into The Club Dumas, I am very excited already
‘Do you know how he [Dumas] answered those who accused him of raping History? “True, I have raped History, but it has produced some beautiful offspring.”‘
- page 13
Don’t you love when just the first few pages of a book make you fall in love with it? I’m having that experience right now with Half of a Yellow Sun.
I never read Club Dumas because I hadn’t yet read Three Musketeers. (Saw the movie recently, not knowing it had anything to do with the Reverte book.)
Finished it (Musketeers) last night. Wow! No way would somene end an adventure novel today with the heros doing what the musketeers did in the end, and described as a “prodigiously” good time.
The book was almost as amazing as Count, and, maybe, a little more fun.
I was distressed to read that “Dumas” was to some extent a brand. Then I figured, “Who Cares! Its a great brand!”
Now I get the fun of choosing what to read next…next year or later this one I’ll get to Twenty Years Later. It looks like there are no other Musketeer novels take place before that one. Is that right?
Yeah, the order goes Three Musketeers, Twenty Years After, and then The Vicomte de Bragelonne, which is so long that it’s usually split into three books (usually Vicomte de Bragelonne, Louise de la Valliere, and The Man In the Iron Mask). You have to make sure you get all three books by the same publishers though, or they might not match up… I’d recommend Oxford World’s Classics. Rest assured I’ll be discussing this in more depth at a later time.
As for Dumas being a brand… it’s true and it’s not. There are many, many books credited as Dumas that were hardly or not at all written by him, yet at the same time there are many that we’re pretty sure were mostly him. Thankfully, this includes his best. As for how much of his best books was by him and how much was by Maquet… well, I’ll get into that later too. The point is, he himself was a great writer, end of story.