El Caligrafo de Voltaire (Voltaire's Caligraphist)

Escrito por Pablo De Santis

Narrado por George Bass

Un forastero llamado Dalessius llega a un puerto con el corazon de Voltaire en un frasco y la obsesion no menos terrible por una mujer. Con estos elementos iniciales y el trasfondo de las ruinas del Antiguo Regimen, ocasionadas por la Revolucion Francesa, la novela consigue colocar a Voltaire y al arte de la caligrafia en un clima mas misterioso, qu real. En la busqueda de la renovacion de ese arte, Dalessius descubre palabras que desaparecen, letras que brillan en la oscuridad o tintas que envenenan. Recostado entre los ataudes de un servicio nocturno de entregas de cadaveres, y bajo las ordenes de Voltaire, viaja primero a Toulouse y luego a Paris, donde debe investigar un plan de fanaticos religiosos que luchan por acabar con la Ilustracion y devolver a Francia la fe perdida. Dalessius sigue los pasos de un fabricante de automatas, pinta mensajes secretos sobre mujeres desnudas y deja que el amor lo distraiga de su mision. A cada paso lo acecha la sombra del legendario caligrafo Silas Darel y una certeza ultima sobre su oficio: todo lo que sirve para escribir, tambien sirve para matar. Con notable agilidad en el relato, Pablo De Santis cuenta una inteligentisima intriga sobre la verdad de las palabras.

• Idioma: Español
• Editorial: Recorded Books, Inc.
• Fecha de lanzamiento: 11 mar 2011
• ISBN: 9781461800156

Comentarios para El Caligrafo de Voltaire (Voltaire's Caligraphist)

[thorold_1 · Calificación: 2 de 5 estrellas]

A postmodern historical novel, set in Enlightenment France and full of playful reflections on philosophy, history, and aesthetics, this is the sort of thing I normally really enjoy, but somehow it never really clicked for me. Maybe it was the translation, which felt a little bit flat and lacking in linguistic bounce, maybe it was the rather over-busy plot, which seemed to be bursting out of the slim, novella-length package in all directions, not giving the characters any real chance to develop and solidify. I believe De Santis is a major figure in graphic-novel circles, and perhaps that has something do with it: the story often felt as though it would have benefited from pictures. A graphic novel format might also have fitted in better with the way the border between history and fantasy is about 90% of the way over to the fantasy side. The general idea is that the narrator, Dalessius, trained in calligraphy and employed as a copyist by the Sage of Ferney, finds himself acting as a kind of secret agent in a power-struggle between his boss and the Dominicans, who are (of course) plotting world-domination. There are also exploding sexbots, poison-pens, time-delay inks, a program-controlled bishop, and an overnight corpse delivery service involved in the story, inter alia. A silly quibble that disturbed me throughout was the use of the word "calligrapher" as job-description for Dalessius. This word first appeared in English in the mid-18th century in line with the rise of interest in orientalism, and it was initially only used to describe artists producing decorative versions of handwritten texts for religious or display purposes in Islamic and Far Eastern cultures. The same applies to French calligraphe — unfortunately I haven't got a historical dictionary of Spanish to hand to check the history of calígrafo, but I assume it will be similar to French. The term calligraphy goes back about a century earlier.The main action of the book is set between the Jean Calas case in 1762 and Voltaire's death in 1778. At that time, someone like Dalessius, whose job was the old-established one of making accurate, high-quality copies of legal and business manuscripts, would have used a term like clerk, copyist (both early-renaissance), scribe or scrivener (medieval). Obviously, there's no law against using an anachronistic word in a historical novel, particularly a non-realist one, but I find it odd when a writer — who presumably knows what he's doing — puts a word like that in the centre of the foreground and doesn't trouble to tell us why he is doing so.

[bookworm12_1 · Calificación: 2 de 5 estrellas]

Dalessius is a 20-year-old calligrapher who ends up working for the philosopher Voltaire in France during the Enlightenment. Interesting enough premise, but the plot never found its pace for me. It felt disjointed and confusing. There are automatons, secret messages written on naked women, a heart in a jar and other intriguing concepts, but they never mesh into a cohesive story. The book is only 150 pages and yet it felt like it was much longer. I found myself never wanting to pick it up and I can’t help but wonder if something was lost in translation. Maybe the plot makes more sense in its native language. I did really enjoy some of Santis’ descriptions of the people Dalessius meets on his journeys. Here’s one description of a watchmaker… “Her many years around clocks had given her words a regular beat, as if each syllable corresponded exactly to a fraction of time.”