Finished reading on: December 22, 2011
The Merchant of Cursed Books
Title of the original version reviewed: «Il mercante di libri maledetti»
AI Translation Notice: This review was translated from the original Italian using artificial intelligence. Book quotes and excerpts are translated interpretations and will not match the author's original English phrasing or official published translations.
The inside back cover likens the book to Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose and Ken Follett’s The Pillars of the Earth.
Nothing of the kind: if one insists on finding a literary reference, one might point instead to The Da Vinci Code.
The setting is the Middle Ages.
A merchant arrives at a monastery in the Polesine region.
He is in search of a mysterious book, but also of a young novice who was raised among the monks.
From here begins a sort of treasure hunt across Europe’s major monasteries (Santiago de Compostela, predictably, could not be omitted) to recover fragments of the mysterious text and piece together, through various clues, a puzzle of meanings and magical formulas.
Throughout this quest, the merchant and his companions (the young novice and a valiant French knight) are pursued by the knights of the Sainte-Vehme, a mysterious and powerful chivalric order.
What follows is a succession of ambushes, surprises, and dramatic turns.
Naturally, the story has a happy ending, yet it leaves the reader disappointed, unable to understand what was so significant about the long-sought book in the first place: could it be just another sham?
The novel is clearly a thriller, yet it lacks all the ingredients that could grant it depth and distinctive character.
The medieval setting is pointless.
Beyond the sequence of monasteries, there is no thorough or evocative world-building rooted in a genuine grasp of the customs and culture of the period.
The characters are flat, and even the figure of the merchant, who might have possessed some allure, comes across as cold, incomprehensible, and superficial.
The book is packed with plot twists, yet they are never preceded by an atmosphere of suspense; as a result, they remain entirely predictable, both in their unfolding and in their outcomes.
It feels almost as if the author focused exclusively on the plot, only to become entangled in a tangle of episodes and circumstances.
Why not read it? Unless one is thoroughly exhausted and in need of something requiring minimal concentration, it simply is not worth the time.