What Lurkes Behind the Shadows

What Lurks Behind The Shadows

The Club Dumas by Arturo Perez-Reverte is a hard read to say the least, but you have to be intrigued to finish a book that starts off with a mysterious suicide brought on by an even more mysterious book. As the story goes on, what seems to be a simple story of a rare book aficionado being paid to research the authenticity of a client's rare book becomes a much more tangled web then anyone could have imagined. "This book weaves an intricate and digressive journey not only through a world of rare books but a secret underground society as well. Two different plotlines intertwine organically, convincing the reader in their affinity and propelling the novel to the unexpected finale. In many ways, the novel is an exploration of obsession; in particular, the obsessions of several different types of bibliophiles." (Fiction About Fiction)

As I read along the journey I couldn't help but picture the whole adventure in my head and thinking of things I would be doing different then Corso at his most intense experiences. Corso is a lonely recluse that enjoys too many cigarettes and too much gin while being justifiably paranoid. He is joined on this journey by a girl named Irene Adler who eerily reminds me of Athena in The Odyssey complete with green eyes and the ability to appear and reappear at the most inopportune times, usually followed by trouble of some sort. As we read of Corso's journey through an underground world of cult people convinced that the book he is researching holds great powers we are also led on the journey of the book's story. As you read through the book you are not only unraveling the mystery behind the book and the people involve but the book and its story as well. Arturo has a wonderful ability to interweave more than one story together while in between the line telling a completely different story all together. In the end it becomes a collection of stories that reflect the fact that you can trust no one and nothing or no one is as its seems. It is almost as if Arturo is telling his reader you may be paranoid, but you have every reason to because what you think may be happening is only the tip of the iceberg. Corso should have known from the beginning this was not going to be just another ordinary day of researching rare books. "He paused briefly, cautious. Caution is a sign of prudence and reserve, but also of shrewdness. And we both knew it." (The Club Dumas)

Allegory is almost a staple of great fiction writers. "Derived from Greek, it is a figurative work in which a surface narrative carries a much deeper, symbolic meaning. Allegories are longer and more detailed than metaphors while being more imaginative and complex than analogies. Many works contain allegories or are allegorical in part, but few are entirely allegorical." (Fiction Matters) I think The Club Dumas is allegorical not only in part but in whole on many levels. The book that the story revolves around, The Book of the Nine Doors is full of allegory. It is a book that when read by common people really makes no sense. In fact the most important part of the book in the 9 engravings or pictures included within. There are three known surviving copies of this book. All three possessors of the book swear theirs is authentic and the others are not. In the end it is found that all three are authentic, in part anyway. Corso finds quite by accident that there are discrepancies in the book that bring about the authenticity of the book. These discrepancies are not in the binding or the paper or anything else he usually looks for but in the pictures. He starts to examine them and finds that in the same picture