The Painter of Battles
This is the new book by Arturo Perez-Reverte, one of my favorite authors. I first discovered him a long time ago during a period where I would take random books from the library. I ended up discovering a few of my favorite books that way, including The Club Dumas by Perez-Reverte. His other books have mostly been intelligent thrillers. This one is much more subdued. There are no real puzzles or action, which is big change but one that he handles well. I was never bored by the lack of big forward motion.
The book concerns a war photographer who has given up his profession to paint a huge war mural in an abandoned stone tower. The subject of one of his war photos finds him one day and explains that he’s going to kill the man who ruined his life with a photo.
The heart of the book is the photographer/painter’s memories of his life as a photographer and his time with the love of his life, a former fashion model and fellow photographer. These memories are interspersed with conversations he gets into with the soldier who has come to kill him. As I said, it’s not an action-packed book so if you’re not a fan of discussions about the nature of observation and of observers influencing what they’re observing, you won’t like this book.
That said, I’m a huge fan of Arturo Perez-Reverte’s work and would read his version of the phonebook. One of favorite aspects of his work has been the picture he paints of the places his books happen in. He’s given me more of a feel for parts of Europe than many movies or documentaries have. This gift for details and descriptions is obvious here, even as the memories feel hazy and somewhat dreamlike at times. It’s a slow book, one good for sinking into and absorbing. It won’t make your mind or heart race but if you give it a chance, it’ll pull you in and you’ll feel like you know these people and care about what has, and will, happen to them.
