The Painter of Battles: a Picspam
Photography of Robert Capa.
Arturo Pérez-Reverte is my hero--my favorite author, hands down, no contest.
In The Painter of Battles, a retired war photographer, Faulques, is painting a mural depicting all the wars in the world in an abandoned lighthouse when he gets a visit a man whose photo he took years ago--a photo made Faulques famous. The man is determined to kill him, but wants Answers in some vague sense. 250 or so pages of extreme navel-gazing ensue.
The dialogue isn't even a little bit believable or human at all about 75% of the time--it reads more like carefully rehearsed soliloquies--but this is clearly Pérez (who was a war journalist) working out his issues, sort of like Slaughterhouse-Five. (Unlike Vonnegut, Pérez's tongue is so far out of his cheek it's in another country. Shit right here is srs bzns.)
This isn't his best book, though I still think it's better than The Club Dumas, and rather than squee all over it I'm going to be constructive and pimp it with a picspam of most of the paintings and photographers mentioned in the book, and a few other things besides. Call it a labor of love--all that Renaissance art, all those great pictures. This book just made me really excited, okay?
Dr. Atl: Erupcion del Parcutin.
Bellini: Sacred Allegory.
Photography of Eugène Atget.
Bruegel: Mad Meg.
Fireflies.
Uccello: Adoration of the Magi.
della Francesca: Death of Adam.
A straight razor.
Venice in paint.
Carducci: Victory at Fleurus
Campanile di San Marco.
Photography of Robert Capa.
Bonnard: Woman Dozing on a Bed (The Indolent Woman).
Photography of Eugène Atget.
de Chirico: Enigma of Fatality.
Museo Nacional de Arte, Mexico.
The Balkans.
Starnina: Thebaid.
Uccello: Battle of San Romano. Middle panel.
Photography of Eugène Atget.
Bruegel: The Triumph of Death.
Photography of Eugène Atget..
Photography of Robert Capa.
Picasso: Guernica.
Fireflies.
Museo Nacional de Arte, Mexico.
Goya: Fight with Cudgels.
But nothing comes out of you that you don't have inside, Faulques believed. Painting, like photography, or love, or conversation, was like those rooms in bombed-out hotels--all the window glass broken, all the contents stripped--that can be furnished only with things you take from your own backpack.