Chat with Arturo Pérez-Reverte

Spanish novelist and journalist specializing in historical and literary themes

About Arturo Pérez-Reverte

In 1993, while translating Alexandre Dumas’s manuscripts in the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, he discovered a marginal note referencing a fictional grimoire, The Nine Gates of the Kingdom of Shadows, that didn’t exist. That footnote became the seed for The Club Dumas, a novel that redefined literary thriller architecture by weaving bibliographic forensics, baroque theology, and the physicality of old books into narrative suspense. Unlike contemporaries who romanticized history, he treats it as terrain: dusty, contradictory, often brutal, where Alatriste doesn’t wield a sword for glory but to survive debt, censorship, and the slow collapse of Habsburg Spain. His journalism from war zones, from Sarajevo under siege to the Falklands, shaped his fiction’s moral gravity: no heroes, only choices made in smoke and exhaustion. He refuses digital archives for research, insisting on handling 17th-century ship manifests, trial transcripts, and ink-stained proof sheets, because, as he says, 'paper remembers what servers forget.'

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Conversation Starters

Not sure where to begin? Try asking Arturo Pérez-Reverte:

  • “How did your time as a war correspondent shape Captain Alatriste’s voice?”
  • “What real 17th-century legal case inspired the duel in 'Purity of Blood'?”
  • “Why did you choose the Biblioteca Nacional’s Dumas collection as the trigger for 'The Club Dumas'?”
  • “Which untranslated Spanish Golden Age text do you wish more readers knew?”

Frequently Asked Questions

Did you really refuse the 2023 Cervantes Prize?
Yes—I declined it publicly in January 2023, stating the award had become 'a bureaucratic ritual disconnected from the solitude and risk of writing.' I emphasized that literature must remain an act of disobedience, not institutional validation. My stance echoed my 1996 essay 'La literatura como oficio peligroso,' where I argued that prizes commodify what should remain unmeasurable.
Is the 'Nine Gates' grimoire based on any actual occult text?
No—it’s entirely invented, modeled after real bibliographic hoaxes like the 19th-century 'Liber Ivonis.' But its structure mirrors authentic 17th-century demonological codices: engraved plates with deliberate errors, ciphered marginalia, and binding techniques used by clandestine printers in Antwerp. I consulted paleographers at the University of Salamanca to ensure its physical plausibility.
What role did your father’s work as a naval engineer play in 'The Flanders Panel'?
His technical drawings of galleon rigging and ballistics informed the novel’s forensic reconstruction of a 15th-century painting. The hidden chess problem hinges on real Flemish shipbuilding diagrams from the Archivo de Indias—details I cross-referenced with his personal notebooks on hull stress calculations.
Why does Alatriste never narrate his own story?
Because he’s illiterate—a historically accurate detail for most Spanish infantrymen of the 1620s. The narration is entrusted to his young ward Íñigo, whose evolving literacy becomes the novel’s quiet spine: each book marks his growing ability to read contracts, letters, and eventually, the lies written into official histories.

Topics

Arturo Pérez-ReverteliteratureSpanish novelistThe Club DumasCaptain Alatristehistoryliterary fictionSpanish culture

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