Customer Reviews

El pintor de batallas/ The Painter of Battles (Narrativa (Punto de Lectura)) (Spanish Edition)

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... between profundity and pretentiousness is tenuous at best, but "The Painter of Battles" hugs that line so closely that it kept me reading all the way through despite a strong suspicion that it would ultimately topple toward the wrong side. As it did, for me. I hated the ending, as I grudgingly expected I would, and thus I can't recommend the book with much enthusiasm.

Spaniard Arturo Perez-Reverte is the immensely popular author of the Captain Alatriste swashbuckles. It was perverse of me, I confess, to choose this atypical "existential" novel for my first exposure to his work. He slings words very fluently, does Señor Perez-Reverte! Too fluently, I fear. In this case, his palette of colors (literally! I had to use a dictionary to find the names of pigments the 'painter of battles' chose for his mural of the meaning of war) was more blinding than illuminating. I suppose my definition of "pretentiousness" would be something like: using the semiotics of deep ideas without actually having any such ideas. One could explicate this novel ad nauseam, as the title-character explicates his enormous painting to the man who intends to murder him, but in the end the most ample explication would only muddle the image.

The "painter" is an aging (in fact, dying) war photographer, extremely successful as such, who has renounced his career and sequestered himself in an isolated tower on a seacliff, where he is painting an immense circular mural on the inside wall. The mural is intended to include all the images of war the "painter' has gathered, both from his photos and the experiences behind them, and from the greatest paintings of war of the Past. One day - in the first chapter - a stranger appears, a Croatian peasant-soldier whose picture the photographer had taken years earlier. The Croatian believes that the photo was 'responsible' for the destruction of his life, and therefore he has pursued the "painter" for revenge. The two men will spend several days - the course of the novel, that is - signifying their lives to each other. Suspense builds, of course: will the Croatian actually kill the painter or not? It's a kind of "My Dinner with Andre" scenario, with somebody's death as the check to be paid. A lot of talk, in short. Whether you find the talk substantive or merely verbose will determine your appreciation of the book.

Here's a representative sample: "The painter of battles moved, dragging his fingers along the cold edge of the crack in the wall. Raw meat, he recalled in surprise, along crocodile tracks in the sand. Horrow always waiting, demanding tithes and sacrifices, ready to decapitate Euclid with the scythe of chaos. Butterflies flitting through all wars and all peaces, every moment a blend of all possible and impossible situations, of cracks implicit in the first instant following the Big Bang within fourteen seconds at a temperature of of three billion kelvins, the beginning of a series of precise contingencies that would create man, and that would kill him." [My own translation; I read El Pintor de Batallas in Spanish.]

I don't know ... One reader's sense of profundity may be another reader's sense of pompous blather. But if I read any more of Perez-Reverte, I think I'll stick to his swashbuckler.