Writing a novel is like building a Mecano

 

Daniel Pérez interviews Arturo Pérez-Reverte.

Escribir una novela es como montar un mecano. Hay que preparar una estructura, un esqueleto, y luego llenarlo. A la hora de perfilar el esquema original de 'El asedio' decidí que no quería hacer un homenaje, pero sí un recorrido por los distintos tonos de todas mis creaciones anteriores; quería que cualquiera de los lectores que me han seguido pudiera distinguir esos rasgos, esas huellas. Es una especie de balance narrativo. Por eso hay referencias a todos los grandes temas que he tocado antes. Incluso 'El pintor de batallas', que es un texto distinto a los demás, tiene una fuerte presencia en 'El asedio'. Es cierto que cada novela que uno escribe es un problema personal que resuelve, y que con cada título vas avanzando, adentrándote más en esas obsesiones que te mueven. Por eso no están tratados de la misma forma que la primera vez, claro. Podríamos decir que todas mis novelas me han llevado a ésta.

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Arturo Pérez-Reverte: El Asedio

According to publishing house Alfaguara, Arturo Pérez-Reverte's latest novel, not yet published 'El asedio' (The siege) is allready in the top selling list of the Spanish online bookstore Casa del Libro.

The events of Arturo Pérez-Reverte's novel occur in 1811 in the province of Cadiz. In a time Spain was fighting for independence, a criminal uses the city as a chessboard in which young women are flayed with whips, with an even more enigmatic event, in each place, before the a body is found, a French bomb has been dropped.




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Latin American Literature

Arturo Pérez-Reverte: The King's Gold

John Spurling reviews Arturo Pérez-Reverte's The King's Gold.

“There is now an idiotic tendency to despise action in novels,” says a literary critic in Arturo Perez-Reverte's third novel, The Dumas Club, published in 1993. He is defending Alexandre Dumas's The Three Musketeers and its sequels against the accusation that they are not sufficiently serious. Since Perez-Reverte has made his name with elaborate intellectual thrillers in which there is plenty of action, this character is clearly speaking for his author.

The King's Gold, however, as its defiantly run-of-the-mill title suggests, has no pretensions to be intellectual. It is the fourth in a series of the adventures of Captain Diego Alatriste, a 17th-century Spanish soldier, and its plot - the covert capture of a treasure ship from the Indies - is hardly more out of the ordinary than its title.

Perez-Reverte's real interest is less in the cloak-and-dagger stuff than in the historical period. Most of the action takes place in and around Seville during the early years of Philip IV's reign. The poet Francisco Quevedo makes a few appearances, as do the king and his minister, the Count-Duke Olivares, but most of the characters are the kind of swaggering killers - big-booted, wide-hatted, long-moustached and thickly jacketed (against being stabbed) - who populate The Three Musketeers or lounge about with their pipes and flagons in genre paintings of the time. Captain Alatriste and his immediate comrades are, of course, not only seasoned toughs and brilliant swordsmen, but are also sensitive and decent men, so much so that, rather than torture a man to obtain information, the captain prefers to terrify him with a recital of what he might do and then burns his own arm to show what he is capable of.

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Spanish Literature

Arturo Pérez-Reverte: The Painter of Battles

Steve Bennett reviews Arturo Pérez-Reverte's The Painter of Battles.

Spanish writer Arturo Pérez-Reverte's novels have been translated into 29 languages in 50 countries. A longtime war correspondent, recently elected a member of the Spanish Royal Academy, he now concentrates on fiction: "The Queen of the South," whose title character is a resourceful Mexican woman caught in the world-wide web of drug trafficking, was on many best book lists of 2005, while his Capt. Alarista series, following the adventures of a 17th-century Spanish soldier of fortune, has been a swashbuckling success, with more than 4 million copies in print.

His latest novel, "The Painter of Battles," is a book-length parable of right vs. wrong, a meditation on the morality of man. Pérez-Reverte is nothing if not ambitious.

Translated from the Spanish by the master, Margaret Sayers Peden, who has brought the work of Isabel Allende, Laura Esquivel, Carlos Fuentes, Mario Vargas Llosa, Pablo Neruda and Octavio Paz to the English-speaking world, "The Painter of Battles" is an intoxicating mix blending philosophy, art history and treatises on the nature of love, the elusiveness of justice, man's inhumanity to man, human cruelty, the utility of war and the necessity of revenge. Pérez-Reverte is undoubtedly a very smart man and very deep thinker.

Trouble is, this cocktail is light on the essential ingredient: story.

Which, basically, is this: Andrés Faulques is an award-winning war photographer who has covered conflicts from Lebanon to Latin America for more than 25 years. He is tired, he is weary. So he retires to a life of solitude in an old tower on the Spanish coast.

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Spanish Literature

Arturo Pérez-Reverte: The Painter of Battles

Katie Goldstein reviews Arturo Pérez-Reverte's The Painter of Battles.

Through a series of wartime memories, many including Olvido, Pérez-Reverte takes us to the burning oil fields of Kuwait, to the war-torn Balkans, to Lebanon, Somalia, Romania, Mozambique, Chad, and beyond. Meanwhile, he acquaints us with Faulques' mural, where ancient and modern war coexist, where everyone from Hector and Andromache to Bosch and Goya plays a role. Markovic, when not prodding Faulques with provocative questions, takes an interest in the painting, in Faulques' vision of war - the vision of an observer, not a participant.

Though Markovic at times seems nothing more than a pain in the painter's side, much like the one that visits the artist reliably every eight hours or so, his presence forces Faulques to face his demons. "Did you ever try to stop anything, señor Faulques?" Markovic asks. "Even once? A beating? A death?"

Both men have lived war, one from behind his camera lens, the other with an automatic weapon in his hands. "Is it chance that leaves an animal's tracks in the snow?" Markovic asks. "Was that what put me in front of your camera or did I walk toward it for subconscious reasons I can't explain?" The narrative development may sometimes move slowly or seem repetitive, but Pérez-Reverte is a skillful architect of the tension between the retired photographer and his former subject, of those who witness and take photographs and those who fight, kill, beat, and torture.

Throughout the course of The Painter of Battles, it becomes apparent that the painter and his former subject have more in common than initially appears. Both are ravaged by war, still living, years later, in its aftermath.

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Spainish Literature

Arturo Pérez-Reverte: The Painter of Battles

Richard Zimler reviews Arturo Pérez-Reverte's 2006 novel The Painter of Battles (El pintor de batallas).

Many of us who grew up during the Vietnam War remember one photograph in particular: a naked Vietnamese girl running down a country road, in flight from a napalm attack, her mouth open in abject terror and hands held out, desperately searching for comfort.

Inside the frozen time of the image, the girl will forever remain abandoned to her fate, ignored by the three uniformed soldiers walking behind her.

Over the years, I've often wondered whether the photographer offered protection to the desperate girl as she ran past him, though perhaps it's unfair of me to hope he did. After all, photographers are observers, not participants. Or are they? Isn't their choice of what subjects to frame inside their viewfinder a form of participation? Might snapping pictures of people in pain or imminent danger be an inhuman way to make a living?

Bestselling Spanish writer Arturo Perez-Reverte explores such complex ethical questions in his novel "The Painter of Battles," and his narrative draws extensively on his experiences as a journalist covering conflicts in the Middle East, Bosnia and elsewhere.

Perez-Reverte's protagonist is Andres Faulques, a world-weary war photographer who has retired to a 300-year-old tower on an isolated bluff on a small island off the Spanish coast. No longer able to find meaning and purpose through his camera lens, he spends his days painting a mural on his tower walls of the atrocities he has witnessed, as well as horrific images gleaned from the battle paintings he most admires. He's convinced that it is in our nature to oppress, humiliate and kill, and his goal is to create a monumental fresco of human existence as he sees it.

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Spanish Literature

Arturo Pérez-Reverte: The Painter of Battles

Stephen Finucan reviews Arturo Pérez-Reverte's The Painter of Battles.

For more than 20 years, Arturo Pérez-Reverte made his livelihood in war zones. Working first as a correspondent for the Spanish daily Pueblo, and later as a reporter for Televisión Española, he filed stories from Cyprus, the Falklands, Beirut, El Salvador, Sarajevo – and Eritrea, where for a period of months he was listed as missing and believed killed.

In the 1980s he turned his pen to fiction, and by the mid-'90s, with a burgeoning reputation as the thinking person's thriller writer and a trio of bestsellers under his belt – The Fencing Master, The Flanders Panel and The Club Dumas – he gave up journalism and began writing full time. He solidified his popularity with the Capitán Alatriste series, tales of a swashbuckling mercenary that fed its author's passion for genre and history, specifically that of Spain's "golden century."

With The Painter of Battles, however, Pérez-Reverte returns to a more recent past, namely the two decades he spent chronicling the horrors of modern warfare.

In the novel, Andrés Faulques, a retired combat photographer, serves as Pérez-Reverte's stand-in. Secluded in a medieval watchtower that overlooks the Mediterranean, Faulques busies himself painting a mural on the tower walls that strives to depict the history of war. His solitude is broken by a young Croatian, Ivo Markovic, the subject of one of Faulques' most famous pictures: a photograph of Croat soldiers retreating from the Serbian onslaught at Vukovar. It's an image that graced the covers of newspapers and magazines worldwide, a photo that Faulques "never failed to take pleasure from."

But it is also a picture that cost Markovic dearly. His face, with its "bright, extremely vacant eyes, features distorted by weariness, skin covered with drops of the same sweat that plastered his dirty, tangled hair to his forehead," was recognized by his Serbian neighbours, who took retribution by raping and murdering his wife and child.

Now Markovic has come for his own vengeance. But before he can take his satisfaction, he needs Faulques to grasp something about himself. "I need for us to talk first," he tells the photographer. "I need to know you better, to be sure that you realize certain things. I want you to learn and understand ... After that, I'll be able to kill you."

What follows is a harrowing meditation not only on the nature of war, but also the nature of humankind.

Markovic's visits to the watchtower stir memories for Faulques, memories of, among other things, the execution of Druse militiamen in Lebanon, the shooting of a looter on the street in Mogadishu, and of wounded Chadian rebels being bound and left on the banks of the Chari river as food for the crocodiles. There are also memories of a former lover, Olvido Ferrara. Faulques may have to answer for as much for her death on the Borovo Naselje road near Vukovar as he does the death of Markovic's family.

For both men, it is the mural that becomes their channel. For Faulques, it has "little to do with his artistic ability and much to do with his memory." His style is stolen from others, from Uccello and Brueghal, Bosch and Goya, because the "old masters, more than anyone, knew how to make the invisible visible." And it is the invisible – the impulse behind the action, the incitement behind the brutality – that Faulques is trying to capture with his brush strokes.

For Markovic, the mural is his key to understanding Faulques, and in doing so, perhaps finding the logic to his own suffering.

The many fans of Pérez-Reverte will find The Painter of Battles a departure. The suspense of the novel is muted in favour of a philosophical approach because the mystery at the heart of this book is more inscrutable: What lies at the root of the cruelties we inflict upon one another?

The answers to this question are not likely to bring much solace. According to Faulques: "The world has never known as much about itself and about nature as it does now, but it doesn't do any good. We've had tidal waves forever, you know.

"What's different is that in the past we didn't try to build four- and five-star hotels along the beach. Man creates euphemisms and smoke screens to deny natural laws. And also to negate his own abominable state. And every time he wakes up it costs him two hundred dead in a plane crash, two hundred thousand in a tsunami, or a million in a civil war."

Markovic's understanding of the question, like himself, is far simpler. The nature of humankind, the nature of the brutality it exacts upon itself, is much like the mural: "Circular, like a trap ... a trap for crazed moles."

In a recent interview with Miranda France of The Telegraph, Pérez-Reverte suggested: "Everything that happens in the book happened for real." He goes on to say, though, that he is not "the tormented type ... I'm not going to go and work for some NGO, it's not in my character. So this book is my solution, my analgesic. It's my way of transforming a nightmare into a ghost."

That he has chosen this stage of his career to find his analgesic is opportune for any number of reasons, but perhaps none more so than the fact that The Painter of Battles will be a bestseller because of the name on the cover – and that in turn means many will read what is surely one of the most important ghost stories to be written in recent memory.

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Spanish Literature

Arturo Pérez-Reverte: The Painter of Battles

Alan Cheuse reviews Arturo Pérez-Reverte's The Painter of Battles.

Just as we have our one-of-a-kind popular writers these days in John Grisham and Stephen King, Spain claims Arturo Pérez-Reverte, one of contemporary fiction's great entertainers. Most of his novels take us back into European history, but now and then he has touched on the contemporary world. In "The Painter of Battles," his latest novel to be translated here, he introduces us to a contemporary with a vengeance: Andres Faulques, a renowned war photographer, who, under the weight of grief and conscience, has withdrawn to an old tower overlooking a bay on Spain's southeast coast, where he has given up photography for painting, an art form he finds difficult and laborious.

"He had a good hand for drawing," we learn in the opening chapter, "but he was a mediocre painter." Faulques, or "the painter of battles" as he is often referred to in these pages, is pushing ahead with his new life-project, a mural on the subject of war that will cover all of the cracking inside walls of the tower. His monumental project incorporates images from major battle paintings by various Western artists as well as some from his two decades as a battlefield photographer in Africa, the Middle East, the Balkans and elsewhere (accompanied in recent years by his last lover, a daunting though not greatly talented Italian woman named Olvido Ferrara). "There was no ambition to achieve a masterwork," we hear. "[T]he mural did not even pretend to be original, although in reality it was the sum and combination of countless images taken from painting and photography that would be impossible without the existence and the eye of the man who was painting in the tower."

The second chapter immediately changes the pitch of the narrative. It opens with the appearance of a visitor to the tower, a stranger who over the course of the rest of the novel becomes quite familiar to the painter of battles. His name is Ivo Markovic, a former foot soldier, who announces to Faulques that he wants revenge for being featured in one of the man's photographs from a battlefield in the Balkans.

The photograph "destroyed my life," and brought down horror on him and his family, Markovic explains. "Now I know enough to agree that it wasn't entirely the work of chance, since there are circumstances that brought you and me to that exact moment on that exact day. And as a consequence of the process begun by you, by me, by whoever, I'm here now. To kill you."

The rest of the novel takes us back and forth between the painter's daily round and his recollections of his past work as a photographer, with his memories of the now deceased Olvido growing more powerful by the hour as his final confrontation with Markovic draws inevitably closer. Were it not for his recollective state of mind, Faulques' encounters with Markovic would have made for a taut if melodramatic narrative - one about half the size of the present volume. But those forays into the past, added to the pages given over to the description of the painter's unfolding mural, lift the story out of the realm of melodrama and give it a heft and gravity it probably could not have otherwise obtained.

"The painter of battles stirred, running his fingers along the cold, rough edges of the crack in the wall. Raw meat, he remembered suddenly, beside amphibian tracks in the sand. Horror always lying in wait, demanding tithes and first fruits, poised to decapitate Euclid with the scythe of chaos. Butterflies fluttering through all wars and all peaces. Every moment was a blend of possible and impossible situations, of cracks predicted from that first instant at a temperature of three billion kelvins within the fourteen seconds and the three minutes following the Big Bang, the beginning of a series of precise coincidences that create man, and that kill him. Drunken gods playing chess, Olympian risk-taking, an errant meteorite only ten kilometers in diameter that, when it struck the Earth and annihilated all animals weighing more than twenty-five kilos, cleared the way for the then small and timid mammals that sixty-five million years later would become Homo sapiens, Homo ludens, Homo occisor."

Laying on page after page of this philosophical rhetoric, the way his artist hero slathers parts of his mural in paint, tends to amplify Faulques' fate, as Pérez-Reverte elevates his novel above the level of the merely entertaining pages of King and Grisham. It also, alas, reminds American readers of the sublime rhetoric of Faulkner and how such passages in the hands of a master can add to the momentum of the story and how, in instances such as this, it can also drown out the music of the plot.

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Spanish Literature

Arturo Pérez-Reverte: The Painter of Battles

Barrie Swift reviews Arturo Pérez-Reverte's The Painter of Battles.

Andres Faulques has spent his life photographing wars. Now retired to an 18th century coastal watchtower, he is painting a giant mural on its walls to capture what his photographs couldn't the meaning of war.

A stranger arrives one day and tells Faulques he is going to kill him. The stranger is in fact the subject of one of Faulques' prize-winning war pictures and wants Faulques to explain his motivations. As the painting progresses, the back stories of photographer and subject are revealed together with interesting references to famous paintings. It is a story of art, love, actions and consequences in the form of a psychological thriller and as such, builds to a satisfying climax. Perez-Reverte is a best-selling author in his native Spain: previously a war correspondent, his experiences show through in the gritty realism of the war scenes he portrays. With translated works it's not possible to gauge the quality of the author's prose, but Peden's translation reveals memorable passages.

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Spanish Literature

Arturo Pérez-Reverte: The Painter of Battles

The Guardian review of Arturo Pérez-Reverte's The Painter of Battles.

A man lives alone, in a crumbling tower by the sea. On its interior wall, he is painting a vast circular mural of war, melding histories and landscapes into a singular nightmare. One day a stranger arrives, and announces that he intends to kill the painter. Instead of punching the man, fleeing or informing the police, the painter takes the news phlegmatically, continuing to work on his mural while receiving the visitor each day for a series of long, philosophical conversations on the nature of art and war.

Such is the curious setup of this novel. There is no point complaining of implausibility, since if the painter had reacted otherwise, this particular story wouldn't exist, and it is this story we have in front of us. Other fictions are based on similar theatrical conceits: perhaps Sandor Marai's Embers, in which two men converse in a castle to reveal one's betrayal, long ago, by the other; or the sly entertainment of another two-hander, Gilbert Adair's A Closed Book. But here Pérez-Reverte - the author of some delicious novels constructed around enigmas in chess or painting, and the series of elegant swashbucklers starring Captain Alatriste - is composing in a more minor and less ludic key.

The painter, Faulques, used to be a war photographer, and his memories of those times form the meat of the novel. (The publishers tell us that Pérez-Reverte drew on his own experience as a war correspondent.) These scenes - in Beirut, Croatia, Chad, Kuwait - are drawn with a terrible precision, beautifully rendered, and yet within them Pérez-Reverte manages to argue also that the beauty is a problem. Paying intense attention to light and colour, allowing Faulques to recall the exact technical details of the f-stops and shutter-speeds he used, he simultaneously draws the reader's gaze over the photographer's shoulder to the killers and victims who appeared to him more as material than as human beings.

The novelist implicates himself, too, in the callousness he depicts in Faulques, using suffering to make art, even as he also indicates what Faulques has to leave out of his work: "What there was no way to photograph was the buzzing of flies - they won all the battles." The strategy can result in moments of powerful, seductive nihilism. On one job, Faulques photographs a group of prisoners who are tied up by a river and left to be eaten by crocodiles. Later, safe in a restaurant, he thinks of all humanity as "rational meat lying in the sun".

But the novel, it seems, does not quite trust the texture of its own painting, and writes explicatory notes to the exhibition. The framing story - that of the present-day conversations between Faulques and the stranger - spells out all the concerns about the ethics of representation that are already eddying, with productive stealth, through the muddy ochres, winter greys and scarlets of the war scenes. The visitor who proclaims his intention to murder the artist is a Croat, called Ivo Markovic, whom Faulques once photographed. The photograph, published internationally, made Markovic recognisable to his enemies, and his wife and daughter were murdered. Thus the issues of responsibility and guilt are rather overtly staged; and there is a lot of inconclusive talk about Faulques's own theories of symmetry and chaos as they apply to art and violence.

There is also a beautiful and tragic woman in Faulques's past. She is called Olvido, and her function in flashback is to laugh behind crystal wineglasses in restaurants and to stand naked on balconies at night. She goes to art galleries with Faulques, where they talk about the paintings; and then follows him to war zones. On the way she is made to say such things as: "I watch you; you're all the time taking mental photos, as focused as if you were practising some strange Bushido discipline, with a camera in place of a samurai sword." That is a rather lovely physical image, but in the end her character seems over-burdened with wisdom.

The Painter of Battles is a strange book, much of its material shoehorned cornily into its flashbacks, its central dialogue straining under the moral weight placed upon it; it's a messy clash between showing and telling. And yet in a way it also becomes the mural of which it tells, drawing a perfectly obsessive, claustrophobic panorama. Few novels display such intensely marshalled powers of extended visual evocation. "Faulques never used pure black," the prose explains laconically at one point. "That colour created holes, like a bullet or burst of shrapnel on the wall." Finally, perhaps redemptively, Pérez-Reverte pulls off an ending of such calm tact and art that the reader is left in contemplative silence, circling the images left in his head.

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Spanish Literature

The Painter of Battles - Arturo Pérez-Reverte

Lorraine Adams reviews Arturo Pérez-Reverte's The Painter of Battles.

Until Susan Sontag disavowed some of her more arch anxieties in "Regarding the Pain of Others," intellectual debate over the depiction of atrocities was mostly a chronicle of aesthetic alarmism. Walter Benjamin’s notion that photography creates "a new reality in the face of which no one can take responsibility for personal decisions" turned out to be fairly silly. John Berger’s idea that overexposure to violent images leads us into unconscionable passivity is demonstrably untrue. (Vide Vietnam.) Terrain that has tripped up such great critical minds is not to be entered incautiously.

Yet Arturo Pérez-Reverte - a Spaniard who writes intellectual thrillers and historical novels about such subjects as fencing and musketeers - proposes to scale these heights. In his latest novel to appear in English (translated by Margaret Sayers Peden), a contemporary war photographer exchanges his Nikon for a paintbrush as he energetically embarks on a pictorial representation of suffering, all "26 centuries of the iconography of war," inspired by everything from Greek vases to Diego Rivera’s murals and every minor Italian master in between. Pérez-Reverte is also drawing on personal experience: before becoming a best-selling novelist, he was a journalist covering conflicts in Lebanon, Bosnia, Libya and elsewhere.

The hero of "The Painter of Battles," Andrés Faulques, lives in a 300-year-old tower on the Spanish coast. A war photographer for 30 years, he’s been everywhere: "Cyprus, Vietnam, Lebanon, Cambodia, Eritrea, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Angola, Mozambique, Iraq, the Balkans." Why did he give up his career to paint a mural on the walls of his tower? Because he couldn’t find, through the lens, "the definitive image; the both fleeting and eternal moment that would explain all things," "the hidden rule that made order out of the implacable geometry of chaos."

Faulques’s foil is a Croatian soldier, Ivo Markovic, who shows up at the tower bearing a photograph of himself that Faulques took in 1991 just before the battle of Vukovar in the former Yugoslavia. The image was on the cover of many magazines and made Markovic famous. It also ruined his life: by the end of the second chapter, he has let Faulques know he intends to kill him.

Yet Markovic repeatedly puts off the murder. "I can’t just kill you," he explains. "I need for us to talk first; I need to know you better, to be sure that you realize certain things. I want you to learn and understand. ... After that, I’ll be able to kill you." Faulques, popping mysterious tablets and occasionally grabbing his side in pain, seems quite ill. He also seems not entirely worried about the threat, although he checks to make sure his shotgun is still in working order.

Throughout this curiously inert and static book, Markovic returns to the story of what happened when, thanks to the photograph, his face became "the face of defeat." Recognized at an army detention center, he was tortured for months by a group of Serbs, then sent to a prison camp, where he was detained for more than two years. Finally released, he went looking for his wife and son, but the photograph had doomed them too. Serbs raped, mutilated and killed his wife because they recognized this likeness of her husband. They ran a bayonet through his 5-year-old son.

Vignettes of depravity, which the photographer and the soldier discuss with stoic manliness, multiply. While Faulques snapped away, men in Chad, wounded and bound, were left on a riverbank to be devoured by crocodiles. Matter-of-factly, Markovic tells of tormenting and beating a mentally retarded man in front of the man’s parents.

The reader feels remarkably distant from these horrors, perhaps because the perpetrators have such drawn-out pseudo-intellectual discussions about who feels the least, who committed the worst wrongs. And perhaps it’s because these discussions are interspersed with cumbersome descriptions of the mural the photographer is painting and how it relates to other works of Western battlefield art: Bruegel the Elder’s "Triumph of Death," Gerardo Murillo’s "Eruption of Paricutín," Goya’s "Duel With Cudgels," Paolo Uccello’s "Battle of San Romano," Gherardo Starnina’s "Thebaid," Aniello Falcone’s "Scene of Sacking Following a Battle."

Pérez-Reverte seems reluctant to omit any remotely pertinent allusion, and he gets into some trouble with his literary references. In one of the rare instances when the two men’s dialogue isn’t too rambling to quote, it dips into a surprising take on British Romanticism. "An English poet wrote the words ‘terrible symmetry’ referring to a tiger’s stripes," Faulques tells Markovic. "He meant that all symmetry encases cruelty."

Another surprising quotation, a translation from Pascal’s "Pensées," prefaces the novel. Pérez-Reverte and his translator have rendered the French philosopher’s "règle des partis" as "the rules of the game," at best an unorthodox translation that trivializes Pascal’s meaning. (Most English translations would render it as "the rule of probability" or the "doctrine of chance.") As the novel proceeds, Pérez-Reverte makes frequent references to geometry as the underlying rule of the game in war photography - and in life. "From below it will always appear to be God’s shoe, but what kills them," Faulques remarks of his subjects, "is geometry." It’s a misapprehension based on a misinterpretation based on a mistranslation.

Amazingly, the novel’s allusive intertextual play fails to smother all drama - especially when Faulques remembers his lover, Olvido Ferrara, an art history student and former fashion model turned photographer. Accompanying him on his travels to various war zones, she takes photographs of objects (shoes, bridges, landscapes) but not people.

Expressions of emotion would have ruined Faulques’s war photography - and possibly his mural - but he had no such difficulty when it came to Olvido:

"Faulques rejoiced in his heart - a savage and at the same time tranquil elation - that he had not been killed any of the times it might have happened, because were that the case, he wouldn’t be there that night, slipping off Olvido’s panties, and he would never have seen her back up a little and fall onto the bed, onto the upturned spread, the loose, snow-wet hair falling across her face, her eyes never breaking from his, her skirt now up to her waist, her legs opening with a deliberate mixture of submission and wanton challenge, while he, still impeccably dressed, knelt before her and placed his lips, numb from the cold, to the dark convergence of those long, perfect legs."

It may be unclear what this passage (and others) about Olvido, a "well brought up and slightly haughty girl," with her "gentle cruelty," has to do with the moral dilemmas of photographing the brutalities of war. It does, however, demonstrate that, given certain convergences, geometry can indeed be fatal - at least to certain novels.

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Spanish Literature

Interview with Arturo Pérez-Reverte

Elizabeth Nash interviews Arturo Pérez-Reverte.

Why write? I ask Spain's bestselling author of adventures and historical potboilers. The packed bar in Madrid's Palace Hotel empties as crowds move to an art auction in the next salon. Arturo Pérez-Reverte breaks the hush. "I clarify things. I organise things. I lead a very chaotic life. Writing enables me to reflect on this. It consoles me for the bad things and celebrates the good. It's a form of organising the intellectually disordered baggage of my life."

He sits hunched in the corner of a squashy sofa, his whole body watchful and alert with the predatory instincts that took him through 23 years as a war correspondent, chasing – as he puts it – the scoop. He turned to full-time fiction in 1995, but still carries those years with him, and recycles them in his work. Not to exorcise demons, then? He snorts dismissively. " That's rubbish. Writing's no catharsis. Literature is an analgesic for life's pains, it doesn't remove them."

It's teatime, but he has a glass of cola ("I had a heavy lunch," he apologises), a couple of venerable notebooks in a plastic folder and a large rolled umbrella propped beside him. All the kit he might need for the immediate future. Pérez-Reverte, now 55, cultivates an austere soldierly style even though his days of action are, he says, long gone. "I always have my hair cut very short, my nails clipped." Part of trying to control and organise his material, his life.

Pérez-Reverte bounded into Spain's literary scene in the mid-1990s with his creation of the world-weary swordsman for hire, Captain Diego Alatriste, who strides through Spain's 17th-century golden age, fighting dirty battles, striving to protect his honour and stay alive. This is the Spain of Cervantes and Velázquez, where high art blossoms in a corrupt society run by a stupid and incompetent court. The six adventures of Alatriste, warrior on the battlefields of Spain's collapsing empire, are devoured by hundreds of thousands in a nation which, Perez-Reverte says, has lost touch with its history. Written in the rapid-fire style of classical adventure yarns that inspired the young book-thirsty Arturo, they also pack a devastating critique of Spain's rulers through history, a message explicitly relevant today.

"We Spaniards have the worst political class in Europe, but the finest people on the front line. In my novels I express love and tenderness for those at the bottom, and disdain for those in power. We've always had terrible rulers. An 11th-century Spanish troubadour wrote: 'What good vassals they would be if they had a good master.' That sums up the whole history of Spain. It's our tragedy."

He grasps for an example. "You know the film Master and Commander? When Captain Aubrey tells his sailors, 'This ship is England.' In Spain that would never happen, either in real life or a film. The legacy of Franco has contaminated our idea of patriotism, making it inoperative, contemptible." He envies the British for their historic patriotism, their solidarity in face of crisis. Then he adds, "It's nothing personal. You have to keep a distance, avoid getting too close, taking sides."

As a boy growing up in Spain's southern port of Cartagena, he was inspired by the adventures of Herman Melville, Joseph Conrad, Robert Louis Stevenson, Jack London, not to mention Homer and Cervantes. "Those writers sent me away from home at 18. It wasn't that I wanted to write like them; I wanted to be the hero, the central character. That's why I was 35 before I started writing. I wanted to live it."

Alatriste's adventures are now appearing in English, after Anglophone readers discovered his other novels of intrigue and adventure – The Dumas Club, The Flanders Panel, The Fencing Master, The Seville Communion, The Nautical Chart, The Queen of the South, and now The Painter of Battles (translated by Margaret Sayers Peden; Weidenfeld & Nicolson, £12.99), his darkest and sparest book so far.

It tells of an award-laden war photographer, Andrés Faulques, who has spent a long career recording images of horror. Faulques has retreated to a Mediterranean watchtower where he is covering the wall with a huge battle-scene mural. He strives to portray the essence of war he couldn't capture on film. Then a stranger arrives, a former soldier from the Balkans who once provided Faulques with a prize-winning shot, and says he's going to kill him. The two men discover that apparently random coincidences obey an iron logic.

"It's the nearest I've got to a personal memoir," Pérez-Reverte says. "Every novel has its own personality, even though they cover similar terrain. This is very introspective, cold, stripped of adjectives and adverbs, a scalpel on a marble table. It's easy to be melodramatic about war, blood, evil men, excesses of violence and all that, but I wanted to do the opposite. To treat horror as something cold and geometric, like metal." He has produced characters more rounded than hitherto, and the memory of a beautiful and intelligent woman.

War isn't about bad people, the writer says. "It's life taken to extremes. It's a cruel world. I don't separate war from normal life. Those who have lived through war know they are never safe." So life is a battleground? "It's... a dangerous place, full of dangerous animals: us. " He takes my notebook and sketches a curving mountain road, with snipers on hilltops. Whether you are hunter or hunted can change from one moment to the next. "You have to learn the rules." In The Painter of Battles, Faulques recalls an episode when he accompanies a sharpshooter in Sarajevo, photographing him as he chooses his prey, then freezes when his momentary ally tells him he was in his rifle sights two days previously. " I have lived these things. I know," he says.

The problem is, and he shifts forward and touches my arm in emphasis, that people are no longer conscious of the danger of our world. "It's a minefield." He gestures to the handful of drinkers still comfortably installed. "Anyone here could step on a mine. They don't realise. We've always known there are tsunamis in Indonesia, that's why no one built on those virgin beaches. The Twin Towers attack was greeted with amazement, but did no one ever tell Americans about the Trojan horse? The horrors of the war in Iraq? Goya told it all in his engravings. It's all happened before. We pay the price of not learning from historical experience. Centuries ago people were not educated and were taken in. Today there's no excuse for ignorance."

Two years ago Pérez-Reverte wrote an account of the battle of Trafalgar from the viewpoint of a Spanish sailor, a peasant dragged from a tavern to confront the British navy, the world's most powerful seaborne killing machine, with no training, scared rigid, yet acutely aware of the craven inadequacy of his commanders. Cabo Trafalgar is written in a corrosive below-decks Spanish argot that jumps the 200 intervening years whilst exuding the historical stench of that terrible day, a turning-point in European power relations. The book is, he reckons, untranslatable.

Pérez-Reverte has become a specialist in rendering historical language, and spoke on the subject when elected to Spain's Royal Academy in 2003. " You can't write a historical novel with the language of Walter Scott, it would be anachronistic and unreadable. I create a special hybrid language, conserving the aroma of the time but adapted to today's reader. It's a creative way to tell a historical story." In Cabo Trafalgar, the miserable powder monkey draws on unsuspected wells of bravery, knowing defeat is inevitable. That dignity is what he admires in his compatriots. " Spaniards in a crisis... are magnificent." He recalls the Madrid train bombings of 2004, when ordinary folk mounted a rescue effort while politicians flapped.

Pérez-Reverte is freer in his public criticisms of authority than any Spaniard I have met. Is this a perk of success? "I am free," he concedes. "I am economically independent... If I am invited to a prime minister's dinner or a literary festival I can say no. I am proud. I admire that kind of dignity, I try to make it a personal ethic."

I ask what he's working on now. "I'm finishing a novel about the Napoleonic Wars, the Third of May": that day, immortalised by Goya, when the Spaniards who rose up against French invaders in 1808 faced the firing squad. Lots of Goya, then. He smiles. "Very goyesca. He saw war. Goya knew."

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Latin American Literature

Purity of Blood by Arturo Perez-Reverte

Peggy Barnett reviews Arturo Perez-Reverte's Purity of Blood

Arturo Perez-Reverte writes historical novels set in his homeland of Spain. This one, Purity of Blood, is the second in a series he is writing about characters in the early 17th century. (The Mary Willis Library also has the first book in the series, Captain Alatriste, if readers prefer to begin at the beginning.)

The narrator is Inigo Balboa, a 13-year-old whose father was killed in battle, fighting for the king. His mother has sent him into the care of his father's friend and fellow soldier, Captain Alatriste. Inigo admires and tries to imitate the courageous, skilled, and honorable captain. Unfortunately, in this corrupt and evil-haunted land, the captain is not paid for his wartime service, and must offer his sword for hire.

The purity of blood of the title refers to the historical fact that any taint of Jewish heritage may lead to the dreaded attention of the Inquisition. The daughter of a prosperous merchant is being held prisoner in a defiledconvent, and the villains of the story threaten to reveal his family history if he appeals to the king. He goes, instead, to a friend of Captain Alatriste, who agrees to help in a rescue attempt.

The "purity of blood" is also a metaphor for the honor of the captain and his friends in contrast to the dishonor and evil of their enemies, who are of influence in the Church and government. This struggle is the background for a tale of derring-do and breathtaking action. Because of treachery, the rescue attempt goes awry in a big way, and young Inigo becomes a prisoner.

"I had heard enough about the practices of the Inquisition -- that sinister shadow that had loomed over our lives for years and years and years -- to know my destination: the dreaded secret dungeons of the Holy Office,in Toledo." Though beaten and abused, Inigo's stubborn courage enables him not to give the captain away. He does not hope for rescue: "The fact is that later, life -- the passing years, adventures, loves, and the wars of our lord and king -- caused me to lose faith in many things. But I had already, young as I was at the time, ceased to believe in miracles."

Faith is a theme of the novel. The Church had become notoriously corrupt, but Perez-Reverte and his characters have faith in integrity and love, and we cheer them on through their turbulent adventures. The author is skillful. Foreshadowing is well-handles: "What I did not know -- God save me! -- was how I would come within a hair of losing my own [life.]" The outcome is not predictable, and though some will die in terrible ways, exactly who will survive is not clear until the end.

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Spanish Literature

The Painter of Battles - Arturo Pérez-Reverte

James Urquhart reviews Arturo Pérez-Reverte's The Painter of Battles.

With murderous intent, Croatian veteran Ivo Markovic tracks down former war photographer Andres Faulques to a derelict coastal tower. Inside, Faulques is trying to capture in a mural the true meaning of humanity that had always eluded his camera. Markovic’s life had been shattered because of appearing in a famous picture by Faulques of terrified, retreating Croatians – but he had also witnessed Faulques photographing the mangled corpse of his colleague and lover, Olvido Ferrara.

Perez-Reverte, himself a former war correspondent, makes a heroic stab at anatomising artistic responsibility in the grudging rapport between Faulques and Markovic. But their aesthetic ruminations smother the more exciting story of Faulques’s truncated affair.

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Spanish Literature

Arturo Pérez-Reverte: The Sun Over Breda

Kai Maristed reviews Arturo Pérez-Reverte's The Sun Over Breda.

For all its rigorous authenticity, and lack of narrative surprise, "The Sun Over Breda" is no arcane, little-known exercise in military history. It's the third volume in Pérez-Reverte's Capt. Alatriste series, which, with his other novels, such as "The Club Dumas," first caught fire in the Spanish-speaking world and now have sold almost 5 million copies worldwide. Pérez-Reverte, a former war correspondent, has recently garnered bouquets of critical accolades in Europe for a subsequent, contemporary novel (as yet unpublished in English), "The Painter of Battles." The title merges two subjects in the foreground of "The Sun Over Breda," and just as Velázquez painted himself into his own work as an observer at Breda, so one can visualize Pérez-Reverte writing himself into the character of a portrayer of warfare.

Perhaps the role, and the attitude, of such fascinated observers must by nature be ambiguous. As Íñigo exclaims, after another round of mutual dismemberment and extinction, "I know that from the beginning of time, well-intentioned people have condemned violence and preached peace and God's word, and I, better than many, know what war does to a man's body and soul, but despite all that … I cannot help but shiver with admiration when I witness the courage of valiant men." Words to ponder, in our time. Read More

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Latin American Literature

Book Review: The Sun over Breda by Arturo Pérez-Reverte

Erik Spanberg reviews Arturo Pérez-Reverte's The Sun over Breda.

"The Sun Over Breda," the third installment of Arturo Pérez-Reverte's delightful series of swashbuckling novels, once again focuses on the reluctantly heroic Captain Alatriste, a mercenary in the Spanish Army and a sword-for-hire in 17th-century Madrid.

This time out, the narrator is Inigo Balboa, a teenager taken in by Alatriste as a favor to a fallen comrade. He recounts the horror and drudgery of a protracted Spanish military campaign in Flanders and offers an extended meditation on a subsequent art mystery. The latter centers on Diego Velazquez's "The Surrender of Breda," a painting which may or may not have included Alatriste amid the high-ranking officials depicted in it. Balboa, meanwhile, remains awed and baffled by the taciturn captain.

The story glides between witty sonnets and nods to Cervantes and the hardened truths and miseries of siege and battle with ample vanity, unrequited romance, and personal rivalry added for good measure. Soldiers contend with lice, gaping wounds, confused battles, empty purses, and poor rations. Boredom and lack of action provide little respite, either. As Balboa reminds the reader, "Fear and watchfulness are bad companions to repose." Once again, Balboa and Alatriste remain good companions to dashing literary fun.

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Spanish Literature

The Sun Over Breda by Arturo Perez-Reverte

In the midst of the Dutch and Spanish dignitaries in the foreground of Diego Velázquez’s war tableau “The Surrender of Breda,” there is a small open space beneath one soldier’s horizontal weapon. It appears to depict the back of the soldier beside him. But it is the suggestion of Arturo Pérez-Reverte’s latest installment in his grandly entertaining Captain Alatriste series that Alatriste, he of the cold gray-green eyes and dauntless courage, was once part of the picture — although his likeness has since been excised.

Was he painted by Velázquez? The claim that he was comes from no less an authority than Íñigo Balboa, Alatriste’s hero-worshiping young companion. Íñigo also claims to have described to Velázquez the visual details of the surrender. Mr. Pérez-Reverte has shaped his third Alatriste book, “The Sun Over Breda,” around this famous painting. In contrast to the more narrative-driven earlier books, “Captain Alatriste” and “Purity of Blood,” this one unfolds on Flemish battlefields rather than in Spain.

So most of the series’s usual, highly enjoyable villainy has been put aside. Enchanting characters like Angélica de Alquézar, she of the “blond corkscrew curls and eyes as blue as the sky over Madrid,” with “a smile identical to the devil’s when, through Eve’s intercession, he tempted Adam to sink his teeth into the fabled apple,” will have to wait until next time.

Although Íñigo’s narration occasionally recapitulates earlier plots (and flashes forward to the time when he is much older, remembering these glory days), the present book’s action is ferociously combative. Mr. Pérez-Reverte, who was once a war correspondent, pieces together the bloody events that led to the Breda surrender in 1625.

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Spanish Literature

Interview with Viggo Mortensen about his role in the movie Alatristedirected by Agustín Díaz Yanes and based on the novel series written by Arturo Pérez-Reverte.


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Spanish Cinema

The monsters, it's you and me.

Arturo Pérez-Reverte's interview to Le Monde (In French).

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Spanish Literature

Captain Alatriste

Captain Alatriste is poised to become fiction's hottest international swashbuckler since the Scarlet Pimpernel. Already a cult hero in Spain, Alatriste is the star of five novels by former journalist Arturo Pérez-Reverte that have sold more than 4 million copies in 50 countries since the first volume appeared a decade ago. That book, Captain Alatriste, was finally published in English last year, and the second, Purity of Blood, came out in January. The captain has his own website, comic strip, board games and, in Madrid, guided tours of his fictional haunts. Alatriste, a feature film based largely on the first book and starring Viggo Mortensen (The Lord of the Rings), will open in Europe and the U.S. later this year. With a $28 million budget, it's the most expensive Spanish-language film ever made in Spain.

The protagonist of this franchise is perhaps the least dashing, most enigmatic hero ever to rattle a rapier. Alatriste speaks little, drinks alone, dresses badly and blunders into traps set by more cunning adversaries. But he is fearless, deadly with a blade and, beneath his armored persona, stubbornly loyal. Those qualities animate the newly translated Purity of Blood. Alatriste is hired to help an aging father free his daughter, a nun, from the clutches of a well-connected priest who is using the convent as his private seraglio. The old man and his family have a secret: as Christian descendants of a converted Jew in anti-Semitic times, they lack "purity of blood" and soon become targets of the Inquisition. Alatriste too comes under suspicion, and the blood, pure and otherwise, begins to flow.

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