Former war correspondent Arturo Pérez-Reverte is also one of the foremost living Spanish writers. His latest novel “The Painter of Battles” goes deep into human nature, the senses of the world and journalistic ethics. The book will be published soon in English. Continental reads the novel in Spanish.
By nature the main character of the novel, former war photographer Faulq ues is a lonely man. Despite his success in covering different conflict zones he become disillusioned with his work, and took refuge in an isolated watchtower by the Mediterranean Sea. He left behind faithful Nikon F3 and his old but loyal Leica 3MD.
Faulques starts to work on a huge painting where he would portray the wars and human sufferings throughout history. He has studied the painting masters like Goya, Brueghel The Elder, Diego Rivera, Paolo Uccello, and many others. He attempts to capturing the picture that he was never able to take in the fields.
Suddenly, one day he has a visitor. It is a ghost from his past. Ivo Markovic has came from the Balkans to kill him. A former soldier had experienced a drastic life change after Faulques took a picture of him. He has now comes to solve that issue.
As the novel progresses, the dialogue between the soldier and the artist goes into art, war, journalistic ethics and the human capacity for both violence and tenderness. The novel is a powerful piece of writing, which has the intensity of a thriller.
Arturo Pérez-Reverte was born in 1951 in the Mediterranean city of Cartagena in Southern Spain. He worked as a journalist for more than twenty years, first in the Madrid daily “Diario Pueblo”, and later for the Spanish National TV (TVE). As a war correspondent for TVE he covered an impressing list of conflicts: Cyprus, Lebanon, Eritrea, the Falklands, Nicaragua, El Salvador, Mozambique, Angola, Croatia, Bosnia, and so on.
Since 1991 he has published 17 books, many of which have become international bestsellers. He has often been compared with the prominent Italian writer Umberto Eco. Among his best known books outside the Spanish-speaking world are The Flanders Panel (1990), The Dumas Club (1993), The Nautical Chart (2000) and The Queen of the South (2002).
Pérez-Reverte still contributes to the Spanish media via his sharp-tongued columns.