The Painter of Battles, Arturo Perez-Reverte

The Painter of Battles by Arturo Perez-Reverte translated by Margaret Sayers Peden is considered a slow and rambling novel.  It is known in Spanish for its effective use of language and that must make it a very challenging thing to translate.  I'm listening to this as an audio book on my commute.

Started:  7/11/2011
Completed: 7/19/2011
Recommendation: Don't do it.  Don't go anywhere near this book.
Recommended By:  I found this book at a Quaker book sale.  The irony was too strong to pass up and the quick quotations on the back didn't hurt.


Review:


This book is slow and very, very repetitive.  The effort to instill horrifying images in your mind as you go through the book is terribly effective.  There are no characters who are ones with which I can in any way associate and the only compelling character unravels at the end and becomes a shadow of someone interesting.  I am tempted to destroy the CDs.

The book is well written and the use of language, at times, engaging.  The subject matter and character development, however, seem more suited to a much shorter medium--perhaps a novelette or long story.  The subject of the awfulness of war does deserve a serious effort, but this Hobbesian look at the human condition obstructs the productive analysis that might have benefited mankind.  The conclusion (and this may or may not be a spoiler depending on how much you like the book, so beware) argues that we are all fated to do evil because mankind is basically evil and subject to an unwritten plan that guides us down the disgusting behavior of war time.  While this could be an interesting line of analysis, the book makes only the most trivial of efforts to support or examine the implications--oddly for a retrospective, the book harps upon the very conditions from within war without much in the way of analysis for how our character flaws lead us to war or how war would ever end (or, even, pause).  SPOILER:  The girlfriend who would have left had she not been allowed to step on a land mine becomes a spokesman for the reader through the book...the reader carries a certain affection for the primary character as the book starts, but realizes that the primary character is simply a caricature of evil writ small...as such not someone with whom one would care to spend time:  Don't waste yours.