Reading Selections for the Sedate

It seems a lot of my recent book choices have been rather feverish, and I didn't help matters by going to see the late show of A Scanner Darkly. (At least I wasn't one of the shrieking girls who had to leave during the first five minutes after getting freaked out by the bugs-crawling-all-over-the-skin scene.) It was time for something cool, refreshing, expected yet not boring, tightly plotted yet never overly suspenseful--in short, an Arturo Perez-Reverte mystery.

This time it was The Nautical Chart--I've already read The Seville Communion and the one about chess--and it didn't disappoint. As usual, the hero was a Spanish man, thoughtful yet not particularly intellectual, sexually lustful but not lascivious, and the (anti?)heroine was collected, tanned, and given to emotional distance and (possibly) betrayal, but never conventional romantic love. Along the way, there was something valuable that was vaguely discussed as worthy of finding, though the actual act of finding it was apparently not worthy of narration, and some murders got tacked on as kind of an after-thought in the last five pages, though their inevitability was apparent for most of the book. And there was a brief attempt at an odd outside narrator as minor character device, which, whatever, narratology.

Maybe it's partly because of the translation that I feel a sense of remove from Perez-Reverte's writing--I appreciate its quality even though it never exactly bowls me over--but sometimes that's just the ticket. I tend to read only a very few authors in the mystery genre, mainly because I like to keep that form of writing as a soothing retreat from either boring but important stuff I have to read for work, or emotionally wrenching stuff I have to read in general, or, you know, books about sentient trash-heaps that I obviously don't have to read but still end up reading and getting scared by anyway. Historical mysteries work especially well for this purpose, and probably that's where I'll go next in the Perez-Reverte oeuvre.

Right after I finish my current selection, P. D. James's The Children of Men, which depicts the near-future in which the human race can no longer reproduce. (This is causing some cognitive dissonance, since James's Adam Dalgliesh mysteries are currently some of the most boringly uneventful yet well-written books on the market; the perfect soothing bedtime reading for any misanthropic Anglophile like me.) I read this book, I must note, solely out of duty to Clive Owen, who will soon be starring in the (judging from the trailer at least) highly dubious movie adaptation. Oh Clive, is there anything I wouldn't do for you? Besides watch Sin City all the way through?