Review: The Club Dumas, Arturo Pérez-Reverte

The front of the jacket blurb on this book describes it as “A cross between Umberto Eco and Anne Rice… Think of The Club Dumas as a beach book for intellectuals.” The source for this description is The New York Daily News. I don’t know that I agree with the description.

The Club Dumas is the story of Lucas Corso, a book detective who searches for rare editions for wealthy clients who don’t mind if Corso bends the law to obtain what they’re looking for. Corso becomes embroiled in the story of The Club Dumas when the owner of part of the original manuscript of The Three Musketeers, is found hanged, the victim of an apparent suicide. Corso is hired to authenticate the fragment, but soon finds himself enmeshed in a search for copies of Of the Nine Doors of the Kingdom of Shadows, a book purported to contain instructions for summoning the devil. Only three copies of this book survived, according to Corso’s client, Varo Borja. The book’s author was burned at the stake in the Inquisition, and most of the book’s copies were destroyed. This book was apparently made into a film, The Ninth Gate, which I haven’t seen, starring Johnny Depp as “Dean” Corso.

I purchased this book at a used bookstore in Northampton on my birthday. It looked promising. In the end, I really had to force myself to finish it because I just wasn’t into it, but I had passed the point of no return. You know what I mean. You’ve invested too much time in a book to stop reading it, and there is also this bit of curiosity about the ending and how it will all tie together. Perhaps if I had read The Three Musketeers, I might have enjoyed it more. I do actually think that familiarity with that book is a prerequisite for enjoying The Club Dumas.

I really despised the cardboard cutout women characters, standard-issue blond femmes fatales. Ugh. No personality and only described so far as the sexual desire they provoke in the male characters. So tired. So boring. So sexist. I think it was the depiction of the two women characters (I only counted two) that soured me on the book. Otherwise, it has a lot of what I like—books at the center of a mysterious plot. The ending I was hoping would pay off wound up being weird and confusing. I don’t know that I really get it. I don’t want to re-read it to figure it out either because I just don’t care about any of the characters enough to try to figure out what happened.

It seems like a lot of readers like this book, so your mileage may vary, but it didn’t do much for me, and I’m so glad I’m done with it so I can read something good. Please Lord, let the next book I read be good. I need a palate cleanser. I keep saying life is too short to read bad books. I wasted a lot of time on this book. I need to take my own advice and forget about how much time I’ve invested in a book. Even if I’ve passed the “point of no return,” I need to put the book down and walk away. I think I need to give up on this genre, too. Too many turkeys in the bunch. I think Matthew Pearl does it well, and perhaps a few other folks out there, but by and large, it’s resulted in quite a few of my worst reads in the last ten-fifteen years (cf. Interred with Their Bones, The Book of Air and Shadows, The Rule of Four, Codex, and The Geographer’s Library—for which I apparently never wrote a review).

Rating: ★★☆☆☆

Birthday Weekend

Birthday petit-fours from my husband
Birthday petit-fours from my husband

It was my birthday this weekend. I have moved into a new demographic!

I decided I wanted to go to Northampton and Amherst for my birthday. There was a Poetry Festival in Amherst, but unfortunately, most of the events I wanted to go to were on Thursday or Friday before I could get there. Bummer. On Saturday, the Emily Dickinson House was sponsoring a marathon reading of all 1789 of her poems, but I really didn’t want to just dip in and out of that, so I wound up deciding to spend Saturday afternoon in Northampton.

Northampton and Amherst are college towns. Between the two of them, I count U Mass Amherst, Amherst College, Smith College, Mouth Holyoke College, and Hampshire College. I may be forgetting some. At any rate, they are close together, and with all those colleges, you can imagine the college-town vibe is strong. Northampton is definitely fairly funky, at least the downtown area.

We found a wonderful used bookstore. I loved it because the books were mostly in pristine condition. So many used bookstores don’t have really nice books, and most of them certainly don’t have the kind of selection Raven Used Books has. Here is my haul from Saturday.

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We went back today before leaving for home, and I scored two more books: Mary Sharratt’s Illuminations and Elena Mauli Shapiro’s 13 Rue Thérèse. The Club Dumas looks like it might be perfect for the R. I. P. Challenge, and who knew that there was a historical fiction novel about Hildegard von Bingen (Illuminations)? Byatt’s novel doesn’t have great reviews on Amazon, but I’ll give it a go. I loved Possession so much.

For my birthday lunch, we went to a burger place called Local Burger. Back when I was in college, I could get an excellent hamburger for about a buck at the cafeteria on campus. It had a nice charbroiled flavor, and it was juicy without being pink (pink ground beef skeeves me out). I hadn’t had a burger as good as those old cheap cafeteria burgers since. Until this one. And the fries were amazing.

We drove into Amherst and stopped into Amherst Books where I found a remainder of Remembering Shakespeare by David Scott Kastan and Kathryn James and Living with Shakespeare edited by Susannah Carson with essays by so many people—F. Murray Abraham, Isabel Allende, Brian Cox, Ralph Fiennes, James Earl Jones, Maxine Hong Kingston, Jane Smiley, Joyce Carol Oates, and many others.

Last night for dinner, we had some excellent Italian food at Pasta e Basta. I was “that person” and took a picture of my pasta because it was so pretty.

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I wish I could have brought my leftovers home. There was at least another meal left on that plate. I didn’t think it would travel well, though.

After dinner we picked up some cookies at Insomnia Cookies. Had such a thing existed when I was in college, I have no idea how big I’d be by now. We got four kinds of cookies, and I can definitely recommend the Double Chocolate Mint. I also tried Peanut Butter Chip, but the Chocolate Chunk and M&M cookies were all gone too fast.

This morning, we went to Jake’s for breakfast, and I had some fantastic eggs, potatoes, and toast. We walked around and did some more shopping. I found myself this glorious Brontë sisters mug with quotes from the sisters’ works.

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Northampton and Amherst are nice places to visit, and they’re only a little over an hour away. They have a different feel from other places in Massachusetts—perhaps because they’re college towns, or perhaps because they’re in the western part of the state. We don’t really have indie bookstores in Worcester, either (that I know of)—just B&N, so it was nice to go book shopping in those places and score some deals on some great-looking new and used books. In addition, everything was pretty reasonably priced—another of the virtues of a college town, I suppose.

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Steve and Dylan at dinner
Maggie and Me
Maggie and Me

Once I was home, Steve presented with two more books: A Loaded Gun: Emily Dickinson for the 21st Century by Jerome Charyn and The Life-Changing Magic of Not Giving a Fuck by Sarah Knight. He had already given me Emily Dickinson’s Poems: As She Preserved Them. My parents sent me a gift card for more goodies from Amazon, too. I really need to do some reading!

P. S. I have no idea why the last image is upside-down on some devices. I can’t figure out how to fix it without deleting and starting over, though, so I just left it.