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

Tomás Eloy Martínez - The Perón Novel (La Novela de Perón)

In June 20, 1973, General Juan Domingo Peron returns to Argentina after eighteen years of exile.
He's accompanied by his wife Isabel and a large entourage. In Madrid he leaves years of disregard for General Franco's regime and the memory of a triumphant Eva Perón whose mummified body rests in he's own home. With him he takes some unfinished memories where he wants to give an image of Napoleon for himself.
More than two million people, the largest crowd ever assembled, waits for him at the airport. Meanwhile, his followers are fighting fiercely to get hold of the symbol that still represents the old General.
Tomás Eloy Martínez, Alfaguara Prize in 2002, summarizes in this novel, full of action and characters from last century's Argentine history, through the biography of a man who embodied the hope of his people, while inquires the multiple faces of truth and the power fiction has to create bridges between them.



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Argentine Literature

Héctor Aguilar Camín - La Guerra de Galio

La Guerra de Galio is one of the great Mexican novels of the late twentieth century.

This account of the turbulent years that followed the Mexican government's violent repression of the student uprising in 1968. However, as in any great literary work, the story goes beyond the obvious to draw a portrait of the generation that entered its adult life in 1968, its ideals, doubts and miseries.

Meanwhile there is still time to tell the love story of a history teacher and a student.



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Mexican Literature

Ángeles Mastretta - Tear This Heart Out (Arráncame la vida)

When Catalina knowns General Andrés Asensio, she is still a girl who knows little of life. However, he's a candidate for Governor of the State of Puebla, and knows very well what their goals as "cacique".
In a few weeks they marry. But Catalina, a passionate and imaginative woman, very soon discovers that she can not accept the way of life that imposed by the new situation and doesn't accept to live without love.

Biographical note from PenguinGroup

Ángeles Mastretta was born in Puebla, Mexico, in October 1949. She began her writing career as a journalist for such publications as Siete, a magazine published by the Ministry of Public Education, and the afternoon paper Ovaciones. In 1974 she was awarded a scholarship at the Mexican Writers’ Center, where she honed her skills among the writers Juan Rulfo, Salvador Elizondo, and Francisco Monterde. In 1975, La pájara pinta (Colorful Bird), a collection of Mastretta’s poetry, was published. However, the novel that she had been brainstorming for years did not reach fruition until an editor offered to pay her salary for six months so that she could quit her job and focus on writing. Six months turned into a year and in 1985 Arráncame la vida (Tear This Heart Out, Riverhead Books, 1997) was published, winning the Mazatlán Prize for Literature for the best book of the year. A stunning success both in Mexico and abroad, the novel quickly cleared a place for Mastretta in the canon of Mexican writers.

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Mexican Literature

Interview with Junot Diaz

Edward Marriott interviews Junot Díaz.

'I didn't start writing until late high school and then I was just diddling. Mainly I loved to read and my writing was an outgrowth of that. I always individuate myself from other writers who say they would die if they couldn't write. For me, I'd die if I couldn't read.'

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Latin American Literature

Juan Carlos Onetti - Let the Wind Speak

Tom Boncza-Tomaszewski reviews Let the Wind Speak (Dejemos hablar al viento),a novel from Uruguayan novelist and short story author Juan Carlos Onetti written in 1979.

Onetti is famous for The Shipyard, published in Uruguay in 1961 – a dark story of how a man tries to save an ailing shipyard and fails ingloriously. Let the Wind Speak was written after the author's exile in Spain and is equally bleak, but without The Shipyard's poetry. It's hard to say what has changed, or even that the fault doesn't lie in the translation, but the writing here is portentous, contorted and very masculine.

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Uruguayan Literature

The director of the latest Spanish adaptation of a Gabriel Garcia Marquez novel, «Love and other Demons,» is hoping for a better reception than the critical panning of the English-language «Love in the Time of Cholera.
«I thought that «Love in the Time of Cholera» was a good film, even though the criticism of it was very tough,» said Costa Rican director, Hilda Hidalgo.

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Latin American Literature

Bernardo Atxaga - The Accordionist's Son

Michael Eaude reviews Bernardo Atxaga's The Accordionist's Son.

Atxaga, born in 1951, came to fame with Obabakoak (1988), a fresh voice in Basque and Spanish literature. The Lone Man, The Lone Woman and Two Brothers followed in the 1990s and are available in English. The Accordionist's Son, first published in the Basque language in 2003, is his most accomplished novel (the wonderful Obabakoak is more a collection of linked stories). It is also his most ambitious, as it embraces the history of the Basque Country from 1936 to 1999.

The novel works on at least three levels: as an adventure; as a public story about the history and politics of the Basque Country; and a personal dissection of shifting mood and feeling, with Atxaga's customary precision. It opens with the death of the protagonist, David, on his ranch in California. His wife Mary Ann and childhood friend Joseba talk in calm sadness about love, death and the past. Two of Atxaga's strengths are at once apparent: his fine storytelling, as he draws the reader expertly into David and Joseba's childhoods in Obaba, and the directness with which he talks about emotions. Subtleties of feeling about death and childhood are expressed in simple, elegant language.

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Spain Literature

Mario Vargas Llosa: The Bad Girl

David Robson reviews Mario Vargas Llosa's The Bad Girl.

The title is promising. Who wants to read about good girls? But then the doubts set in. Will one bad girl be enough? The trouble with bad girls in literature is that they have shot their bolt after a couple of bedroom scenes. Only the best of them - the ones who are good girls underneath - can sustain a whole novel.

The Peruvian veteran Mario Vargas Llosa has found an ingenious solution to an old problem. He uses a single bad girl, but to keep the character fresh, re-introduces her in a series of different guises.

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Peruvian 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

Bernado Atxaga: The Accordionist's Son

Nick Caistor reviews Bernado Atxaga's The Accordionist's Son.

The Basques have a word for it. That word is usually unpronounceable and unconnected to any other European language, reflecting the uniqueness of the history of that troubled, distinctive northern corner of Spain. In The Accordionist's Son , one of these words is zulo, here translated as "hiding-place". Over the 60-year period that the novel covers, from the 1930s to the 1990s, this zulo is used for many different purposes, all of them essential to the lived history of the village of Obaba in the heart of the Basque country.
During the civil war in the 30s, "the American" who owns a hotel coveted by the Francoists is hidden there before he succeeds in escaping over the border to France and eventually makes it back to the United States. In the 60s, the novel's protagonist David Imaz spends hours in its dark well as he makes his silent protest at being forced to play his accordion at the inauguration of a monument being erected for only one side of those who fought in the civil war. And in the 70s, when a new Spain and a new Basque country are struggling to emerge as the Franco regime crumbles, the zulo is given a more sinister function: it is used as a prison where the groups fighting for Basque independence keep the people they have kidnapped and are holding to ransom. Beyond this, Bernardo Atxaga suggests, the zulo is a symbol of the state of mind of the Basques themselves: the dark, hidden place where their complex identity is forged and from which they often only reluctantly emerge.

The novel begins and ends far from Obaba. Like many Basques, the Imaz family have been forced to emigrate. For reasons that become clear only later, David has gone to join his Uncle Juan in California. The opening centres on David's death and the arrival of Joseba, his closest friend from the Basque country, to attend his funeral. David's American widow Mary Ann presents Joseba with her husband's long memoir about his life before emigration and his explanation of how he arrived in California, and it is this memoir that constitutes the bulk of The Accordionist's Son. Born in the 50s, David finds himself surrounded by adults who bear the scars of a war he did not participate in and whose meaning he only gradually comes to understand. As he does so, he realises not only that his father Angel (the accordionist) was on Franco's side, but that he could have been directly responsible for the deaths of seven people in their home village of Obaba. Growing to manhood, David rejects his father's view of the world, with its illusion of progress and attraction to the sophistication of life beyond the village. He himself is far more drawn to the countryside, to horses, the forests surrounding the green valleys, his "peasant" friends, Joseba and local girls, the link with the land and the sensual pleasures of being immersed in still unspoilt nature.

Despite this, David accepts the need to go away to university to study. There in the early 70s he meets fellow students who are much more politically aware than he is. They do not simply feel nostalgia for the village life of the Basque country - they see it as somewhere that has always suffered at the hands of the Spanish, with Franco as simply the most recent manifestation of this oppression. They are determined to take advantage of his disappearance to win independence at last. Almost without realising it, David and Joseba find themselves drawn into this movement, until at the climax of the book they are faced with the choice between espousing violence to win freedom and accepting that yet again others will decide their future for them - in many ways the same choice as that faced by their parents' generation.

In all his work, Atxaga delves into the impact of the political on individual lives. What is most moving in The Accordionist's Son is the push and counter-push of these pressures on a believable individual (and Margaret Jull Costa's elegant and unfussy translation gives us a clear view of him in English) as he contends with the weight of history and a sense of belonging, and assesses his possibilities for action.

The conclusion to the novel is in many ways a sombre one. David rejects using violent means to preserve his garden of Eden, and in so doing is expelled far from it, to a 21st century in which Basque shepherds tend their sheep in the parks of San Francisco. Escape from the zulo can only come at a huge cost.

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Spanish Literature

Spanish poet Ángel González one of Spain's most prominent poets and member of a literary generation known for its opposition to the dictatorship of General Francisco Franco, died last Saturday at the age of 82.







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Spanish Literature