...
Show More
After thinking about it for a long time, I have come to the conclusion that I have a love-hate relationship with this book. Let's start with the good things. The book has spectacular, detailed, and very beautiful prose (although sometimes a bit pretentious), which, however, allowed me to get hooked on the book. And it's not like I could read it in one sitting or that I couldn't put it down, but rather that I often thought about it and its mystery. In addition, the revelations, both related to the painting and to real life, were surprising and were woven to perfection, making you wonder how you could have been so stupid as not to notice before, or at least to suspect it. Pérez-Reverte clearly has the talent to leave you small pieces of the puzzle, scattered throughout the book, that seem unimportant but that you remember well enough for the plot-twists to have all the logic in the world. Now, with all the praise, I'm going to start listing my complaints, which is actually what I like most about writing this review. First, I want to put a fragment: «The artist's path, and I'm talking to you, my young Alcibiades, or better yet Patrolo, or perhaps Sergio... The path is to overcome obstacle after obstacle until one can look inside oneself... A difficult task, if one doesn't have a Virgil at hand to guide one. Do you catch the fine parable, young man? That's how the artist finally knows the free delight of the sweetest pleasure. His life becomes pure creation and he no longer needs the miserable external things. He is far, very far, from the rest of his despicable fellows. And space and maturity nest within him» If you weren't here, on Goodreads, reading the review of this book, you could easily believe that this is a fragment taken from a 19th-century book, from Romanticism, something that a character or the narrator would say, but not a fragment of something that a person - or a character, rather - would say nowadays, and I know it's from the 90s, I'm very clear about that, but still I can't imagine that any person would say that in reality after the 30s. And this really took me out of the book and made me stop thinking so much about the mystery and rather think about the anger it gave me that they didn't talk like minimally normal people. Also, I find that the book didn't age well. These thirty years that have passed since it was published have taken their toll, and perhaps I'm not able to forget, because of my generation, all these details, and let's list them as I remember: 1. They enter the chess club and César (the gay antiquarian) says that women don't play there, but at home, between embroidery and sewing, and that Julia was hateful for calling him sexist. 2. They rule out some suspects because "probably it's not a woman, because almost no woman plays chess well". 3. Imagine that women play chess so badly that in the Soviet Union, where chess is a national sport, there has only been one woman who won the national championship, because, you know, chess requires math. 4. "I insist that it's not common for a woman to play chess well". 5. César made an almost feminine gesture. 6. César made a theatrical gesture. 7. The antiquarian raised an eyebrow, in a theatrical gesture. 8. The bishop represented César, because it was the most feminine, in his forms, which represented his homosexuality. 9. César's female intuition told him that... 10. Muñoz (the chess player) and César stayed an entire night on guard outside her house, without her consent, because of course Julia wasn't capable of defending herself alone despite having a gun. And a long etcetera. And it's that the whole book is like this, and they repeat it all the time, and I wasn't able to ignore it, no matter how much I tried. I think it's clear that César is a caricatured stereotype of gays, but not only him, but also Muñoz is a stereotype; the failed type, who is good for nothing but playing chess, whose eyes shine when he sees a board, but become opaque and lifeless when he doesn't. That his hair was disheveled, that his life was a story of failure, blah, blah, blah. And Menchu, oh, Menchu was a bitch, who always wore a very short skirt, who always thought about men, that the only thing that mattered to her was money... In conclusion, the book was written in a masterful way, with a fast pace despite having pompous prose and with the mystery, first of the painting and then of real life, revealed in an extraordinary way. In addition, despite having many things related to chess (which I don't handle very well) it didn't seem confusing to me, or anything. But, despite all these things in its favor, it has the defect that two of the three protagonists don't seem realistic to me and that it's more full of discriminatory comments than all the 19th-century books I've read together. At the end, I must admit that I enjoyed it, and that I recommend it.
