January 2, 2006
NOTHING LIKE A GOOD SWASHBUCKLER:
A popular Spanish sword-for-hire returns: Arturo Pérez-Reverte offers up the second in a swashbuckling series. (Erik Spanberg, CS Monitor)
Last spring, Pérez-Reverte's revered series chronicling the escapades of a 17th-century sword-for-hire debuted in America with the English translation and publication of "Captain Alatriste." The title character, Diego Alatriste, is a stubborn, taciturn man with a pragmatic view of violence and political corruption. His inevitable scrapes invariably begin in minute focus and soon extend to the highest reaches of government, set against the backdrop of the perfidious Spanish Inquisition. [...]Posted by Orrin Judd at January 2, 2006 10:49 AMÍñigo Balboa serves as the swordsman's Boswell, recounting Alatriste's duels with dual perspectives. The vantage points ricochet between young Íñigo, who witnesses Alatriste's swashbuckling events as an adolescent, and old Íñigo, who provides wry assessments ("The good don Miguel de Cervantes - the greatest genius of all time, no matter how those English heretics chirp on about their Shakespeare....")
Now comes Purity of Blood, published in the US for the first time in January and the second title in the Alatriste series.
My name is Inigo Montoya.
You killed my father. Prepare to die.
Posted by: Sandy P at January 3, 2006 10:41 AMI have noticed, in my ramblings about the Net, that there is a HUGE overlap between the type of people who loved The Princess Bride, and those that like to participate in chatrooms and on blogs.
Fully half of all the unattributed, throw-away quotes that I've seen over the past three years, ones that the poster expects to be instantly recognized, come from that one movie.
I'm in the "overlap" group, too, but why The Princess Bride, and not some other SciFi/Fantasy film or TV series, I dunno.
Maybe it was just that good.
Posted by: Michael Herdegen at January 4, 2006 3:23 AM