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Acclaimed author Arturo Pérez-Reverte has earned a distinguished reputation as a master of the literary thriller with his international bestsellers The Club Dumas and The Queen of the South. Now, in this haunting new work, Pérez-Reverte has written his most accomplished novel to date. The Painter of Battles is a captivating tale of love, war, art, and revenge.
Andrés Faulques, a world-renowned war photographer, has retired to a life of solitude on the Spanish coast. On the walls of a tower overlooking the sea, he spends his days painting a huge mural that pays homage to history's classic works of war art and that incorporates a lifetime of disturbing images.
One night, an unexpected visitor arrives at Faulques' door and challenges the painter to remember him. As Faulques struggles to recall the face, the man explains that he was the subject of an iconic photo taken by Faulques in a war zone years ago. "And why have you come looking for me?" asks Faulques. The stranger answers, "Because I'm going to kill you."
This story transports Faulques to the time when he crossed continents to capture conflicts on film with his lover, Olvido, at his side. Until she walked into his life, Faulques muses, he had believed he would survive both war and women.
As the tense dialogue between Faulques and his visitor continues, the stakes grow ever higher. What they are grappling with quickly proves to be not just Faulques' fate but the very nature of human love and cruelty itself.
Arturo Pérez-Reverte perfectly balances the shadows of the heart with the chaos of war in this stunning composition on morality. Superb and tautly written, The Painter of Battles is a deeply affecting novel about life and art.
Review:
"Novelist and former war correspondent Prez-Reverte (The Club Dumas; The Queen of the South) adds another taut literary thriller to his critically acclaimed list. Andres Faulques, an award-winning war photographer, is holed up in a stone tower on the Spanish coast, purging his wartime memories by painting a battle-scene mural. He has abandoned photography and is also unsuccessfully trying to banish the memory of his lover, the brilliant, bewitching Olvido, also a war photographer, who was killed as Faulques watched. One day, a strange visitor, the Croatian ex-soldier Ivo Markovic (who turns out to be the subject of one of Faulques's most famous photos), arrives with an evil agenda: he plans to kill Faulques, but first he wants to tell him how the photo altered the course of his life. (Let's say it didn't do him any favors.) Some readers may find the narrative slow — much of the novel takes place in Faulques's head, with lengthy reflections on the atrocities he has photographed, the social responsibilities of artists and photographers, and the consequences of choice and chance — though others will relish the meticulous details and dark, brooding tone." Publishers Weekly (Copyright Reed Business Information, Inc.)
Review:
"'The Painter of Battles' seems to be a departure for Arturo Perez-Reverte, a writer best known for the fine historical novels in his Captain Alatriste series and for labyrinthine thrillers such as 'The Flanders Panel' and 'The Fencing Master.' It is, in fact, a distillation. Purified of whimsy and flourish, this austere — yet overheated — novel addresses questions that have long preoccupied the... Washington Post Book Review (read the entire Washington Post review) former war correspondent. Why does war exist? What is the nature of evil, of humanity? What can one man, or in this case one artist, do when he witnesses unspeakable crimes? These questions, along with the death of his lover, have driven war photographer Andres Faulques to ascetic isolation in an 18th-century watchtower on the Spanish coast. 'He swam one hundred and fifty strokes out to sea,' the book begins, 'and the same number back, as he did each morning, until he felt the round pebbles of the shore beneath his feet. He dried himself, using the towel he'd hung on a tree trunk that had been swept in by the sea.' Then he paints, day after day, another section of the gigantic mural that eventually will cover the interior wall of his fortress. Echoes of Dumas' 'The Count of Monte Cristo' are unmistakable. Unlike Edmond Dantes, however, Faulques is obsessed not with escape, revenge or even justice but with 'the definitive image; the both fleeting and eternal moment that would explain all things.' That is why he began taking photographs — in Beirut, Vietnam, El Salvador, Yugoslavia, Africa — and also why he stopped. 'I'm painting the photo I was never able to get,' he observes as he struggles to represent what he has seen and to uncover 'the code of the blueprint ... the geometry of chaos' that underlies seemingly random atrocities. Such fevered language establishes the novel's portentous style and bodes ill for the reader. We, too, it seems, may be sequestered — inside Faulques' mind, where memories of love and war fester alongside 'three decades of war photography and twenty-six centuries of war iconography.' This is a bleak prospect. Faulques is, after all, a photographer who is described as seeking 'the miracle that would suddenly, through his lens, sketch on the rigorously Platonic camera obscura of his camera and his retina the secret of that surpassingly complex warp and woof that returned life to what it really was: a perilous excursion toward death and nothingness.' Faulques the painter might be even more insufferable. Thankfully, in Chapter 2, a stranger arrives, precipitating dialogue, which is a relief, even when it goes like this: '"I don't know you," he said, irritated. '"You may not remember me, but you do know me."' The visitor is Ivo Markovic, a Croatian former soldier who was photographed by Faulques in the aftermath of a massacre near Vukovar. The picture brought wider fame to the photographer and misery to Markovic. Identified by chance from the image, the soldier was tortured in a Serbian concentration camp. His wife was raped, mutilated and killed, his young son murdered. 'I need to know you better,' the polite, spectacle-wearing Croatian announces. 'I want you to learn and understand. ... After that, I'll be able to kill you.' That's better. Now we have suspense, perhaps even a plot. In earlier novels by Perez-Reverte — 'The Queen of the South,' for example — dread is a strong undercurrent, and there are flashes of it here. With each visit, Markovic becomes more complex and, consequently, more menacing, while Faulques is exposed as just another war casualty who may be dying of cancer. As he weakens, his recollections of horror become as stark as excerpts from a war correspondent's notebook. In Lebanon, 'three Druse militiamen at the moment of being executed by six Christian Phalangists, the latter kneeling three meters from their victims, rifles aimed and firing.' In Chad, a dozen rebels 'wounded and bound, had been dragged to the river and left to be devoured by crocodiles.' Faulques, inspired by 15th-century frescoes and by the paintings of Paolo Uccello, attempts to exorcise his demons in his mural. But Markovic has his own reflections to contribute. While the two men discuss torture, killing, rape, conscience, Faulques explains his sense of 'a hidden order in disorder,' citing, among others, Blake and Aristotle. All discussions, however, return to the Balkans where Faulques lost his beloved Olvido Ferrara, an aristocratic former model who seems to find war zones particularly arousing. In Kuwait 'they made love till dawn, in silence, uninterrupted even during a raid of Iraqi Scud missiles.' Near Dubrovnik, they 'sat on the terrace of his room, glasses in hand, watching the city burn in the distance.' Later, Olvido, naked on the balcony, takes a 'fire bath' in the glow of that conflagration. A cross between Princess Di and Lee Miller, she may be Perez-Reverte's most irritating, overblown heroine. Even her demise, like the novel's graceful denouement, cannot quite redeem the excesses that have preceded it." Reviewed by Anna Mundow, who is a literary columnist for the Boston Globe and a contributor to the Irish Times, Washington Post Book World (Copyright 2006 Washington Post Book World Service/Washington Post Writers Group)
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Review:
"[Pérez-Reverte's] talent has never been on better display than it is here. The author draws on his experience as a war journalist to craft a ruthlessly examined tale of moral responsibility....With extraordinary imagery; highly recommended." Library Journal
Review:
"[Faulques'] 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." San Francisco Chronicle
Review:
"The reader feels remarkably distant from these horrors, perhaps because the perpetrators have such drawn-out pseudo-intellectual discussions....Pérez-Reverte seems reluctant to omit any remotely pertinent allusion, and he gets into some trouble with his literary references." Lorraine Adams, The New York Times Book Review
Synopsis:
The internationally bestselling author of The Club Dumas and The Queen of the South delivers his most ambitious and profoundly affecting novel to date — a tale that, more than ever, confirms his ability as a writer of extraordinary literary power.
Arturo Pérez-Reverte's bestselling books, including The Club Dumas, The Flanders Panel, The Seville Communion, and the Captain Alatriste series, have been translated into thirty-four languages in fifty countries and have sold millions of copies. Pérez-Reverte was born in 1951 in Cartagena, Spain, and now lives in Madrid, where he was recently elected to the Spanish Royal Academy. A retired war journalist, he covered conflicts in Angola, Bosnia, Croatia, El Salvador, Lebanon, Libya, Nicaragua, Romania, the Persian Gulf, and Sudan, among others. He now writes fiction full-time.
Jennifer Knighton, January 11, 2011 (view all comments by Jennifer Knighton)
Every book by Arturo Perez Reverte that I have read has been written and translated in such skilled and beautiful writing that a person can't help but admire the skill behind them. The author either knows or researches his subjects so thoroughly that you believe his characters are the experts they're meant to be.
This particular piece is a painting made of words. The detail is so well presented you can picture every scene. It is a story of memories, regrets, and the effects of every action we make. Our choices change the world around us and sometimes those changes come to find us later in life - in our own minds and in person.
I found this book to be one of the richest pieces of literature I've read in a long time and was as easy to get into as a much lighter piece of fiction.
redrockbookworm, July 22, 2008 (view all comments by redrockbookworm)
The Painter of Battles is a beautifully written word picture encompassing everything from "the Butterfly effect", to art history lessons, to a morality homily on the futility of war and the evil that man bestows on his fellow man.
Perez-Reverte draws you into the story as he meticulously recounts (probably from his own experiences as a war journalist) example after example of the insanity of war and examines the cruelty and finality of its outcome. In essence, Perez-Reverte gives us and in depth look at the nature of man who he perceives as possessing an in-born inescapable evil that he has, utilizing his superior intelligence, refined through the centurys into an art form.
This story of two men, inescapably linked by a war, a chance encounter and a photograph, and the culmination of those events is mezmerizing. As the story progresses, their relationship becomes almost symbiotic in nature.
This is definitely not your "run of the mill" novel and Perez-Reverte is not your run of the mill writer. His fluent prose and evocative observations will fill your mind and soul like a fine dinner satisfies your hunger. Perez-Reverte has created his own "Butterfly Effect". By writing this book, he has effected the perception of his readers.
Was this comment helpful? | Yes | No (4 of 5 readers found this comment helpful)
Rowena, June 10, 2008 (view all comments by Rowena)
Arturo Perez-Reverte has garnered acclaim for his previous novels such as The Seville Communion, The Queen of the South, and the Captain Alatriste historical series. Now, with The Painter of Battles, he has witten a novel which involves the reader in a story of war, love and revenge, and also in art and history. Andre Faulques was a combat photographer, winner of awards for his shots of wars from Africa to Bosnia. Then he quit, moved to a tower on the Spanish coast, and began to paint a mural covering centuries of warfare. Now a man enters his life,a subject of one of his photos of Bosnia, and announces he is going to kill Faulques at some point. As they get to know each other they talk of wars, of the painting, of the man's dead wife and son. But Faulques thinks often of the love of his life, who went with him into the wars, who took her own pictures. This is a stunning, beautifully written book, to be reread.
Was this comment helpful? | Yes | No (2 of 4 readers found this comment helpful)
Product details
224 pages
Random House -
English9781400065981
Reviews:
"Publishers Weekly Review"
by Publishers Weekly,
"Novelist and former war correspondent Prez-Reverte (The Club Dumas; The Queen of the South) adds another taut literary thriller to his critically acclaimed list. Andres Faulques, an award-winning war photographer, is holed up in a stone tower on the Spanish coast, purging his wartime memories by painting a battle-scene mural. He has abandoned photography and is also unsuccessfully trying to banish the memory of his lover, the brilliant, bewitching Olvido, also a war photographer, who was killed as Faulques watched. One day, a strange visitor, the Croatian ex-soldier Ivo Markovic (who turns out to be the subject of one of Faulques's most famous photos), arrives with an evil agenda: he plans to kill Faulques, but first he wants to tell him how the photo altered the course of his life. (Let's say it didn't do him any favors.) Some readers may find the narrative slow — much of the novel takes place in Faulques's head, with lengthy reflections on the atrocities he has photographed, the social responsibilities of artists and photographers, and the consequences of choice and chance — though others will relish the meticulous details and dark, brooding tone." Publishers Weekly (Copyright Reed Business Information, Inc.)
"Review"
by Library Journal,
"[Pérez-Reverte's] talent has never been on better display than it is here. The author draws on his experience as a war journalist to craft a ruthlessly examined tale of moral responsibility....With extraordinary imagery; highly recommended."
"Review"
by San Francisco Chronicle,
"[Faulques'] 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."
"Review"
by Lorraine Adams, The New York Times Book Review,
"The reader feels remarkably distant from these horrors, perhaps because the perpetrators have such drawn-out pseudo-intellectual discussions....Pérez-Reverte seems reluctant to omit any remotely pertinent allusion, and he gets into some trouble with his literary references."
"Synopsis"
by chrisb@powells.com,
The internationally bestselling author of The Club Dumas and The Queen of the South delivers his most ambitious and profoundly affecting novel to date — a tale that, more than ever, confirms his ability as a writer of extraordinary literary power.
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