The Dumas Club

by Arturo Pérez-Reverte

Paperback, 2000

Status

Available

Call number

PQ6666.E765 C5813 1998

Genres

Collection

Dennis R. Neill Equality Center

Publication

Random House USA Inc (2000), Edition: 1st Vintage International Ed, 384 pages

Description

A provocative literary thriller that playfully pays tribute to classic tales of mystery and adventure Lucas Corso is a book detective, a middle-aged mercenary hired to hunt down rare editions for wealthy and unscrupulous clients. When a well-known bibliophile is found dead, leaving behind part of the original manuscript of Alexandre Dumas'sThe Three Musketeers, Corso is brought in to authenticate the fragment. He is soon drawn into a swirling plot involving devil worship, occult practices, and swashbuckling derring-do among a cast of characters bearing a suspicious resemblance to those of Dumas's masterpiece. Aided by a mysterious beauty named for a Conan Doyle heroine, Corso travels from Madrid to Toledo to Paris on the killer's trail in this twisty intellectual romp through the book world.… (more)

Media reviews

Publishers Weekly

"Spain's bestselling novelist follows three polished and erudite thrillers (The Flanders Panel; The Club Dumas; The Seville Communion) with a fourth that combines the classic art of fencing, 19th-century Spanish monarchical politics and the eternal lure of the femme fatale."

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Kirkus Reviews

"Not quite equal to Perez-Reverte’s very best, though it succeeds admirably both as a vivid picture of an unfamiliar culture and as high, sophisticated entertainment."

knjigainfo.com

Junak romana, Lukas Korso, je vrstan poznavalac retkih rukopisa i antikvitetnih knjiga. Kad je poznati izdavač i bibliofil pronađen mrtav u svom kabinetu, ispostavlja se da je posedovao rukopis 42. poglavlja Diminog romana Tri musketara. Korso je angažovan da potvrdi autentičnost rukopisa, ali

istovremeno za drugog klijenta mora da utvrdi koji je od tri postojeća primerka okultnog priručnika Knjiga o devet vrata u kraljevstvo senki pravi. Neko, međutim, po obrascu književne zbilje otežava Korsovo istraživanje, roman se raslojava na nekoliko nivoa, a glavni junak i čitalac lutaju između dve knjige i tri zapleta, nekoliko ubistava i ljubavnih veza, da bi tek čudno društvo Kluba Dima dovelo do razrešenja.

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knjigainfo.com

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L'Express

Un roman délectable qui se situe entre Le Nom de la Rose, les jeux de rôles et Agatha Christie.

User reviews

LibraryThing member paradoxosalpha

This novel enjoyed some international popularity for some time before it became the basis of Roman Polanski's delightful thriller The Ninth Gate. Happily, that movie does not exhaust the merits of this book, being an adaptation of only one of the two interlaced central plots, the duplicity of which

are fundamental to the story being told.

From my own perspective, The Club Dumas is notable for being a modern novel to involve the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili. Pérez-Reverte's protagonist Lucas Corso is a broker of rare books and manuscripts. Besides the explicit mention of a 1545 (second edition) Hypnerotomachia (47-49), it is apparent that Poliphilo -- as well as H.P. Lovecraft's imagined Necronomicon -- has influenced Pérez-Reverte’s conception of his plot-crucial imaginary grimoire, the 1666 De Umbrarum Regni Novem Portis, with its offensiveness to Christian sensibilities, provocative woodcut illustrations, impenetrable text, and Venetian origin. The novel includes the illustrations, which are richly iconic Tarot-like images.

But all that is within the plot-line harvested for The Ninth Gate. At the same time, Corso in the novel is involved with an attempt to locate an alleged fugitive original manuscript of a chapter from The Three Musketeers, and it is the phenomena of textual obsession, multiple authorship, and criminal intrigue that tie the literary and occult halves of the story into a braided whole. The novel is lively, not dense: a genuine pleasure read for the bookish.

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LibraryThing member c.pergiel

I'm not quite sure what to make of this. On one it was readable and intriguing. On the other was girl who was dumped into the middle of the plot and never really explained. And the coincidental overlap of two intrigues, one merely harmful, the other fatal, didn't quite jibe. And what was all the

babbling about encoded latin phrases at the end? Was there really any point to it? It was hard to feel much simpathy for the protagonist, given the disparaging descriptions. Reading this did make me interested in reading the Three Musketeers.

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LibraryThing member Mikalina

I´ll give the book one star, not because it deserves so, but in accordance with the inherent rules of accrediting books in this way. A single star shows that I have read the book, and is merely meant to illuminate my fellow reader that reading the book is waste of time.

The author knows how to

tickle the vanity of the professional reviewer - the literary namedropping is as astounding as it is superficial and idiosyncratic. The author is leaning heavily on the literary giant Alexandre Dumas - only to show his profound lack of understanding for Dumas¨s project. Despite showing that he knows the word "archetype" and many other words from the literary terminology, his misuse of Dumas is highly personal. He tries to use Dumas masterpiece to cover up the thin (and unbelievable and boring plot) of a dealer in antiquarian books serving as a unknowing intermediary for a rich madman, researching the authenticity of old esoteric literature, books he needs to get his hands on to practise devil worship. The thin plot is fleshed out when the hero´s research gets muddled when he gets involved in a musketeer-play put up by the leader of the 67 members of a Dumas-club owning 1 chapter each of the original script to "The Three musketeers" when chapter 42 gets lost. Most of the book is following the hero taking on the role as d´Artagnan.

Sometimes I wonder whether literary critics praise works heavy with literary allusions just because they are afraid they otherwise would be thought as ignorant of the classical tradition. This book is not meta-literature or literature that merits place as part of intertextual conversation. It is fraud. The author is a mercenary in words. The one star might be merited by the fact that the books shows how empty both story and language is if the author does not, as Dumas did, know how to play by the rules. D´Artagnan in the hands of Perez-Reverte is as twisted and fallen as the valuble collection of books the villain in this story, Varo Borja, ruins at the end of the book in order to put up the circle he needs to summon the devil. And the murders committed? - they do not count for much - A kind of poetic justice is fulfilled then, when neither does Perez-Reverte´s attempt to assassin "The Three Musketeers".

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LibraryThing member elenchus

The flesh-and-blood Corso, having an ID, a known place of residence, and a physical presence, of which his aching bones were proof, was increasingly tempted to see himself as a real character in an imaginary world. [260]

A fun read blending book culture (both literature and craft of printing),

occult history, a conspiracy / murder mystery, and a literary puzzle. Much more satisfying than Zafron's Shadow of the Wind, and ultimately meatier than The DaVinci Code, though I can't vouch for The Club Dumas's occult content being any more accurate, whether historically or in ritual terms.

Now I've read the novel, I'm certainly more interested in the Depp/Polanski movie The Ninth Gate, though I'm not persuaded a film treatment, even a good one, would bring something to the story not already in the book. For one thing, the metafictional aspects would be misleading in a film, or at least become an altogether different element. Perhaps the plates from De Umbrarum Regni Novum Portis could be presented in a striking manner. However, the nine plates were reproduced / illustrated in the edition I read, along with some tabular figures used to summarize the differences across the 3 copies of the book (differences key to the steganography utilised by the author). The illustrations fit the style of the book as well as the requirements of the plot quite handily.

//

Three libraries feature in the story:

Varo Borja's fictional library of the devil contains several authentic titles, unclear whether any are Pérez-Reverte's invention or if they are perhaps all gleaned from history. [53-57]

Borja's library has a twin, that of Victor Fargas's library of the occult / esoterica:

... a great many books, five hundred or more, Corsa estimated, maybe even a thousand. Many codices and incunabula among them. Wonderful old books bound in leather or parchment. Ancient tomes with studs in the covers, folios, Elzevirs, their bindings decorated with goffering, bosses, rosettes, locks, their spines and front edges decorated with gilding and calligraphy done by medieval monks in the scriptoria of their monasteries. [143]

And then, the mountebank author and baroness Frieda Ungern's "research library" housed with the Ungern Foundation, "the largest collection in Europe of books on the occult ... and one of the best catalogues of demonology". [219ff]

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LibraryThing member voracious

Lucas Corso is a paid book mercenary on a quest to solve two separate mysteries, one involving an original handwritten manuscript of a chapter from the Three Musketeers and another involving an ancient book associated with conjuring the devil. As the story unwinds, Corso's adventure begins to

resemble a modern day version of Dumas' Musketeers as tongue-in-cheek parallels are drawn between the reader of The Club Dumas and Corso's "real life adventure". I found this novel to be adventurous and clever, but the continual and at times, longwinded references to obscure European literary sources overly burdened the storyline. Towards the end, the book became more humorous and faster paced, which I enjoyed. I would definately recommend this translated Spanish novel but I would also suggest reading the Three Musketeers before engaging in this literary adventure, as I suspect it would be a more enjoyable ride.

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LibraryThing member sbloom42

This book is an excellent piece of post-modern writing. While on the surface it is about a chase to rescue one manuscript and verify the authenticity of another, at its heart the book is about how readers become entangled in their own expectations of fiction. During my reading I found myself

thinking about the narrative devices being used by the author when, just about that time, one of the characters would seem to break the fourth wall, while staying within the confines of the plot, and describe the use and mis-use of exactly the device that I had just noticed. Towards the end of the book I found myself caught up in the same narrative entanglements as the main character, and feeling the very same anger and betrayal, which says mountains about how a reader's interpretations and expectations can alter the experience of the story. Even though the surface story relies on cliched scenes and characters, this book is much more than it appears to be.

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LibraryThing member Luisali

The premises seemed so entertaining (rare book collections and a Dumas' manuscript), but in the end "The Club Dumas" was really disappointing reading. The characters are dull in the best of the cases and one-dimensional in the worse one. The author mixes up two interesting plots without resolving

them satisfactorily. The final straw that put this book and his author on my "nevermore list" was tedious repetitions about the girl's light green eyes and tanned legs.
The only interesting part was the one about Dumas and the serial novel genre and this says a lot about a book that was supposed to be a fast-paced thriller.

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LibraryThing member BobNolin

I get the feeling this book was meant to be tongue in cheek, but that, during translation, tongue and cheek became separated. As it stands, the writing here is overwrought, purple, inflated, and boring. There are two separate mysteries here, which never come together, which left me (and the

protagonist) disappointed. This is a book I just *barely* got through. I kept going, and eventually, about halfway through, a mystery or two did rear their heads. Prior to that, I was just watching a schlemiel stumble around, drink gin, and smoke unfiltered cigarettes. The antique book trade info was all that kept me going, and even that was pretty dull. Calling this a suspense thriller for intellectuals is good marketing, but far from the truth. It's all atmosphere and no guts, no meat and potatoes. I can't imagine any veteran mystery or thriller fan putting up with this book. How it became such a huge success is one of those mysteries up there with Brittany Spears and Harry Potter. Oops. Shouldn't have said that. There are three blondes in the book with big boobs, no other women. The final one calls herself Irene Adler, and we never do find out her real name, where she came from, or what she's doing in the story. This, perhaps, is the most egregious of the book's many sins. But then, I suppose a book about summoning the devil should be sinful. Too bad there's so little pleasure to go along with it.

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LibraryThing member Bookmarque

An interesting enough book, but ultimately not very satisfying. I picked it up because of the Dumas angle, him being one of my favorite novelists. The overall approach was good - to keep the mystery and tension building around the manuscripts, not as a result of some enemy breathing down his neck.

It’s harder to do and I appreciated it. The women were eye-rollingly ridiculous though. Wish-fulfillment vehicles or mere props so that the men could have something to do/win/impress. Old-world insults the lot of it. And it wasn’t difficult to figure out that the real villain was the narrator a la Roger Ackroyd, the name of the novel having been dropped a couple of times. Then there was a photographer named Nikon. OMFG. Really? Oy.

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LibraryThing member Talbin

** POTENTIAL SPOILERS **

The Club Dumas, by Arturo Perez-Reverte, follows Lucas Corso, as he tries to authenticate an original manuscript of a chapter from The Three Muskateers at the same time as he is comparing the three remaining editions of The Nine Doors, a 1666 book on the devil. Corso is

drawn into a strange series of events that mirrors Alexandre Dumas' famous serial novel, while wrestling with the potentially more sinister implications of investigating a book about the occult and devil worship.

This was an excellent book with many interwoven layers. On the face of it, The Club Dumas is a mystery novel. Corso is attempting to discover who is responsible for the strange events and deaths that he encounters. On another level, Perez-Reverte is exploring the innocence and knowledge, death and redemption of the soul.

And yet another layer examines the relationship between the author and the reader. And in the end, this is the layer that intrigued me the most. Balkan, the professor with whom Corso consults about the chapter from The Three Muskateers), sums it up this way: "Listen, Corso, there are no innocent readers anymore. Each overlays the text with his own perverse view. A reader is the total of all he's read, in addition to all the films and television he's seen. To the information supplied by the author he'll always add his own. And that's where the danger lies: an excess of references caused you to create the wrong opponent, or an imaginary opponent. . . . The information a book provides in an objective given. It may be presented by a malevolent author who wishes to mislead, but it is never false. It is the reader who makes a false reading" (p. 335). Corso, as the "reader's representative" in The Club Dumas, misreads the signs throughout the course of the novel, leading him to assume the wrong intentions of just about everyone around him.

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LibraryThing member surreality

Plot: It's a mystery/detective novel with a plot which is simple, but tends to meander. At times it could have benefited from exploring side plots a little more, or from straightening and streamlining. Overall it maintains tension throughout the book, and it has a few nice twists and turns, and a

great, abrupt stop to one plotline that's far too rarely done.

Characters: The characters are a little hard to get into. Side characters are sketched with plenty of stereotypes; the central character remains quite colorless and bland. Too much telling, not enough showing.

Style: This is the book's strong point. Lots and lots of references and in-jokes to other books and writers. A lot of information (real and made-up) on demonological literature and old books in general. The prose itself is nothing extraordinary, but the passages where characters talk about books are very well done.

Plus: The in-jokes for bibliophiles.

Minus: Too many scenes, plot twists and characters could have done with more fleshing out. As it is, the narration is often too brief and thus confusing.

Summary: No Eco, but an easy-to-read, entertaining adventure with intriguing book-related gossip on the side.

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LibraryThing member ChazziFrazz

Lucas Corso, a mercenary in the world of rare books. For the right price he will hunt down rare books, do the research to authenticate books, no matter what it takes.

Corso is a small man, wears rumpled and scuffed clothes, wire rimmed glasses, carries a large canvas bag that is frequently stuffed

with books, papers and other detritus of his world along with a flask of Bols gin, smokes unfiltered cigarettes. This outer appearance hides a prodigious memory of detailed information on books — where they can be found, their current value, authors and content, who to trust and who not. His ability to fast talk, quick reflexes and quick thinking are not apparent.

He is hired by a client to research the book “The Nine Doors,” written in the 1600s. There are only three copies left in the world, and the question is to locate them and determine which if his copy is true or a forgery. He is also hired to authenticate pages from “Le Vin D’Anjou” (The Pear Wine), purported to have been written by Alexandre Dumas.

What he finds is a plot involving devil worship, a cast of characters straight out of “The Three Musketeers,” and the deaths of the people he visit to get his information on “The Nine Doors.” It seems he has two mysteries to deal with at the same time.

Quotes and references to the history of various books run through the whole book. It puts me in mind of Dan Brown’s books. With such information, I took my time reading it, and enjoyed it.

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LibraryThing member Castlelass

Set in Spain, Portugal, and France, antiquarian book dealer Lucas Corso is hired to research the authenticity of a rare manuscript purportedly written by Alexander Dumas. He is provided a copy of another book, The Nine Doors, that is rumored to contain information on how to summon Satan, and asked

to investigate the two remaining copies, which may be forgeries. During these two investigations he meets people who resemble characters in Dumas’ The Three Musketeers.

This is a book for lovers of books. It contains a mystery within a mystery. It contains a plethora of literary references, past book printing and binding techniques, historical information about the life of Alexander Dumas, and an in-depth examination of the characters in The Three Musketeers. This book requires active engagement by the reader and is not a quick read. It is an elaborate puzzle, and the reader will need to pay close attention to details, especially early in the story, as these come into play later on. Though the author provides context, to get the most out of this book, it is helpful to have somewhat recently read The Three Musketeers.

I enjoyed the portions about Corso traveling around Europe to immerse himself in ancient book collections. Once it gets to the possible connections to the occult, it gets a little outlandish. Do not be surprised if it is difficult, if not impossible, to solve the mystery before being provided a large amount of information near the end.

3.5

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LibraryThing member BookConcierge

Lucas Corso is a book mercenary. When he is tasked with authenticating a manuscript purporting to be an original chapter from Alexandre Dumas’s The Three Musketeers he winds up in the midst of a highly intricate game that may cost him his life, or even his soul. The quest takes him from Madrid to

France and Portugal, and involves a cast of characters that I sometimes found confusing.

There is a second plot line that is part of the reason for the confusion. In his attempt to authenticate the Dumas manuscript, he comes across another work – The Nine Doors. This red herring … or is it? … centers on satanic rites and devil worship. The twists and turns, intersecting vs parallel paths, insights and missteps all help to confound the reader’s attempts to solve the puzzle before Corso does.

It’s an adventure tale, a murder mystery and a morality play all at once.

The book abounds with literary references, mostly to the work of Dumas, but also to other works. I was reminded of The Shadow of the Wind, although THIS book preceded Zafon’s novel by nearly a decade.

Life interfered with my ability to read this work continuously, so I was forced to stop and then pick it up a few weeks later. I’m sure than affected my rating. I enjoyed it, but didn’t love it.

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LibraryThing member lauriebrown54

In ‘The Club Dumas’, Lucas Corso, a sort of mercenary book finder, is hired to authenticate a part of Dumas’s ‘The Three Musketeers” when the owner of it is found dead, presumably by his own hand. The search is not straight forward; it proves to have Byzantine twists and turns. Corso also

finds himself in a search for a book that summons the devil; multiple versions exists and he needs to know which is the authentic one- especially since there was only one surviving copy when the author was put to death during the Inquisition. People keep dying, Corso is being followed by someone who likes to beat him up, and a young woman who calls herself Irene Adler keeps showing up.

This is a book for bibliophiles; there are numerous references to real books and many books invented just for this story. I think the story would have seemed richer to me had I a knowledge of ‘The Three Musketeers’ and other Dumas works.

The plot has so many twists and turns that I had a hard time keeping it all straight in my head. I had a big problem with the book in that I found Corso to be completely unlikable. He’s so completely self-serving that I just could not find him sympathetic. Irene Adler is a cipher; to the end we never find out who she really is. I found the endings to both plot threads rather unsatisfying. I admit that the book held my interest right up until the end; the book references, talk about how literary forgeries are done, and the history used in the story were fascinating.

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LibraryThing member Cygnus555

A fun book - not a classic or a great work of literature, but fun. I was turned onto Perez-Reverte through this book and read many of his others. Nice read for a day at the beach or a trip on the plane.

LibraryThing member Lukerik

I really enjoyed the film so snapped this up when I saw it 2nd hand. I then realised that the book has a connection to The Three Musketeers that The Ninth Gate lacked. So I read that first and then this. It should be said that this book not only gives away crucial plot points from The Musketeers

(excellent by the way, and highly recommended), but also from the sequels right up to the end of The Man in the Iron Mask.

Anyway, what we have here is excellent. A real book for book lovers, with ancient books, autograph manuscripts and instructions on how to forge them; an interesting mystery with surprises and a shed load of very clever and at times very funny post-modernist jokes, all handled as apparently they can be only by continental Europeans.

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LibraryThing member thejohnsmith

a good read with plenty in it that kept me engaged. I got to like Lucas Corso and his mystery girl companion. Never did quite work out who she was though.

LibraryThing member IsotropicJoseph

A good summer read.

Although you'd never know it from the title, The Club Dumas was the basis of the movie The Ninth Gate, directed by Roman Polanski and staring Johnny Depp. Although the movie removed an entire plot line from the book, it was well done (except for the last 5 minutes) and is one of

those few cases where the movie is almost as good as the book.

I recommend it for what it is: well researched and imagined, light, summer fare.

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LibraryThing member LaurieRKing

Not light reads, but for those rainy nights when you want something to chew over...

LibraryThing member kattepusen

On the cover of this book there is printed a review that claims this novel to be a "beach book for intellectuals". Well, it is definitely a pleasant beach read; however, I think this particular reviewer fluffs the ego of its audience...

It is a typical "dude-lit" thriller - sprinkled with some

supposedly high-brow reflections on the world of literature and books. There are two parallel story lines - one concerning the Three Musketeers by Dumas and the other dealing with a fictious 17th-century occult classic that can be used to summon Lucifer himself. The two stories are interwoven, but in a rather artificial and contrived way. Moreover, when the finale is reached, the mystery of the two parallel stories reaches a disappointing collapse.

However, the protagonist - Lucas Corso - is quite a fun fellow to take us through the motions. His mercenary lifestyle as a book dealer makes for entertaining reading, and his "inner turmoil" albeit a bit cliche for the genre, is quite touching at times.

The language is often terribly cheesy... There are several over-the-top descriptions such as "her blue eyes were as warm as a Scandinavian fjord at three in the morning" and a female character's hips are likened to the midnight sun that never sets and can bear little blond Erics and Siegfrieds. Furthermore, there is constant mention of pretty female legs and busts along with non--stop referrals to the protagonist's drinking habits. Yes, we get it - he drinks gin. A lot.

On the other hand, the descriptions of book collecting, classic novels and the way such are preserved were quite interesting. Reading about incunabula, woodcuts, Moroccan leather and parchment versus linen, one gets the urge to reach in and take a feel and have a sniff of this world. I learned a lot of trivia - such as the fact that current cellulose books don't last much more than 60 years!

All in all, a decent thriller with the expected "unexpected" twists and turns. I saw the Roman Polanski movie based on part of this novel right afterwards, and even though it stars everybody's favorite actor, Johnny Depp, it is quite bad. I would recommend the book - even though it is best suited in a cheap paperback binding...

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LibraryThing member carioca

This is a fun read and for Dumas fans it definitely strikes a chord. I enjoyed the book's plot and twists and I would certainly have liked it more if the Devil were kept out of the story. As it is, I usually don't warm up to Devil-oriented books; no real reason why, I just find them hard to

"believe" (as much as one would need to believe them in order to enjoy good fiction, I know). But the book has good pace, and I couldn't help and thing of that Polanski's movie with Johnny Depp - I guess it is based on Reverte's book.

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LibraryThing member etrainer

A good story, but I didn't think the book lived up to the praise I heard about it.

LibraryThing member bcquinnsmom

All of Perez-Reverte's books are intellectual mysteries between two covers. This one is no exception. The hunt is on for copies of a specific medieval text. The hunter soon joins the ranks of the hunted and ends up solving not only the mystery of where the books are, but the meaning of the books

themselves.

There was a movie based on this...The Ninth Gate, but skip it and read the book. If you've read Dumas, you will really appreciate what's going on here. If not, well, you'll learn something.

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LibraryThing member ragwaine

Good writing style. Not too heavy, funny, european setting, just mystical enough.

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