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    The Painter of Battles: A Novel
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    The Painter of Battles: A Novel
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    The Painter of Battles: A Novel
    Audiobook8 hours

    The Painter of Battles: A Novel

    Written by Arturo Perez-Reverte

    Narrated by Simon Vance

    3.5/5

    ()

    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this audiobook

    Acclaimed author Arturo Pérez-Reverte has earned a distinguished reputation as a master of the literary thriller. Now, he gives us his most accomplished novel to date.

    Andrés Faulques, a world-renowned war photographer, has retired to a life of solitude on the Spanish coast. 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, in this stunning composition on morality. Superb and tautly written, The Painter of Battles is a deeply affecting audiobook about life and art.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherPenguin Random House Audio
    Release dateJan 8, 2008
    ISBN9780739358719
    Unavailable
    The Painter of Battles: A Novel
    Author

    Arturo Perez-Reverte

    Arturo Pérez-Reverte is the #1 internationally bestselling author of many critically acclaimed novels, including The Club Dumas, The Queen of the South, and The Siege, which won the International Dagger Award from the Crime Writers’ Association. A retired war journalist, he lives in Madrid and is a member of the Royal Spanish Academy. His books have been translated into more than forty languages and have been adapted to the big screen.

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    Reviews for The Painter of Battles

    3.5/5

    218 ratings12 reviews

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    • 4/5
      If I could give half ratings, this book would score a 4 1/2 stars...it has it's flaws but quite a few passages are quite brilliant.

      The basic premise is the life story, looking towards the past, of a famous war photographer. He's isolated and painting a huge battle to rival anything he's seen in real life throughout all of the countries and people he's photographing at war.


      But very soon within the first part of the book, he's confronted by a man who was the subject of one of his photos...the man claims his life has been ruined by that photo, perhaps even more so than after he lost his wife and son. This is a man who has been studying our protagonist for years...every photograph has proved to be a research point up until this moment of confrontation.


      What ensues for the majority of the novel, besides intermittent graphic details of war, is a philosophical debate in which the major question at hand is what responsibility lies inherent within the photographer. It's also a story, in many ways of love lost...a love that seems quite honestly rather epic even only from the male protagonist's perspective.


      Besides, it has a good ending.
    • 3/5
      A very strange tale. Great language as usual.
    • 4/5
      A dark book about war and why it exists, excellent read, with a very supprising ending
    • 4/5
      The Painter of Battles is Faulques, a veteran war photographer who had spent thirty years on the wastelands of humanity all over the world. He has now put the camera away and paints instead. He has isolated himself to a tower near a little village by the Mediterranean where he paints a mural around the inside of the round tower. It is to be the picture he never managed (or never could have) to photograph.One day one of Faulques' past works comes alive: a soldier from one of his award winning pictures visits the tower. The man, Ivo Markovic, tells the Painter that the photograph that had made him famous also had turned his life into hell. He also says that he has come to kill Faulques.Markovic does not, however, want to kill the Painter straightaway. He wants to talk, he wants to learn and understand. And he wants Faulques to learn and understand.And they sure talk, they talk about the mural, about photography and photographs, art, life and deaths, causes and effects, and what they were and what they are, and about the last picture Faulques took during the Balkans' war.Beside the converstations there are a few sections that are Faulques' memories of his career.In the end all three things converge: Faulques' memories, the conversations with Markovic and the painting."...I don't know if it is good, but it sure makes one think", says Markovic about the mural the Painter of Battles is working on. Same could be said about the book, though it is good. Maybe not a masterwork, but good.I could point out a few shortcomings in the book if I wanted to make my point being critical. But I don't feel like that now. Find them out yourself. Read the book, I think it makes good to anyone who has even once seen a war photograph. Or any journalistic photograph for that matter.I don't know if Faulques is based on any real-life photographer, but there are lots of real painters and paintings mentioned that Faulques had used as his learning material and models. I didn't check the all but all that I decided to look up could be found on the net. Seeing them was rewarding in itself---I don't know art history very well so they were mostly new to me---but also helped me to "see" the Faulques' mural more clearly. It enhanced my reading experience, they made a point.I mostly talk about the food-for-thought -point of view above, but don't let that make you think The Painter of Battles is just that. It is a well enough written and constucted story to be enjoyed that way too: just reading it.
    • 5/5
      The events which take place in 'The Painter of Battles' revolve around a watchtower overlooking the sea. It is inhabited by a man who has in the past been a war photographer,who in his time has taken many famous and horrific images of conflict throughout the world. He is now,for reasons which become clear in the course of the book, painting a huge mural around the interior of the tower. With this mural he is attempting to paint something of war,which were missing from his photographs.One day a stranger from his past arrives at the tower and tells him that at an unspecified date and time he will kill him. The rest of the book consists of the discussions between these two characters on the immorality of war,in which many interesting points are raised. Some of the descriptions of events during these wars are truly terrible. Fine writing from Arturo Perez-Reverte make this a true anti-war novel.
    • 5/5
      extraordinary book of a war photo-journalist whose photo brings great tragedy and that subject comes to find him for justice. WOW.
    • 4/5
      This is an interesting and complex novel. It covers the life of a war photographer, his spectacular girlfriend, also a photographer, and a Serbian soldier whose family was tortured and killed as a result of a picture the photographer took. From the outset the mission of the Serb is to kill the photographer, but as the two of them talk, over and about a mural the photographer is painting, the Serb concludes that the photographer is already dead. An investigation into the nature of compulsive behavior and excellence in one field to the exclusion of everything else. Enjoyable, but not a page turner. It helps to read this with a computer nearby so that you can look up and see some of the war art that the author has the photographer describe. A very literate excursion.
    • 3/5
      Interesting, but depressing. Graphic detail about war violence. One thing I didn't care for was the dialogue. The things the author has his characters say doesn't sound like things that would really come out of someone's mouth. No one in normal language speaks in philosophical riddles and complexities.
    • 1/5
      Too much war.
    • 3/5
      A little bit different than most of Perez-Reverte's books, but I really enjoyed the discussion of art. It made me go to the library and look up all the different artists and works discussed.Synopsis: Old guy secluded himself in a tower on the coast of Spain to paint a mural that will be his life's work and culmination of his work as a war photographer. Mysterious stranger shows up and learns his life story.
    • 5/5
      bookshelves: autumn-2013, fraudio, translation, tbr-busting-2013, art-forms, published-2006, spain, war, revenge, philosophy, teh-brillianz, mystery-thrillerRead from October 07 to 09, 2013Simon Vance reads.From the cover: Acclaimed author Arturo Perez-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, Perez-Reverte has written his most accomplished novel to date. "The Painter of Battles "is a captivating tale of love, war, art, and revenge.So whilst humming along painting a huge mural depicting war there is a knock at the door *rap rap* and standing there is a man who says...And the visitor comes everyday and the talk is of morals and war, art and ethics. Hands up who else sees this is Dickens's Christmas Carol all over again without resorting to the metaphysical, and this prize winning photo-journalist has some sticky questions to answer.Have found that Arturo Pérez-Reverte is consistently to my liking and isn't it wonderful when that happens. Art in historical fiction rings all my bells and this one kept me on the edge of my seatThe Soldier Drinks by ChagallGoya4* The Club Dumas3* The Flanders Panel3* Captain Alatriste4* Purity of Blood3* The Sun over Breda5* The Painter of BattlesCrossposted Booklikes, aNobii, LibraryThing GoodReads
    • 5/5
      One of the many reasons why I love Perez-Reverte's books is that they follow no set formula or pattern except that they are all off-beat in their own way. But this one pushes the envelope, I think—and in the end, after recovering from what is a very, very dark view of human nature, I think it is among his best, if not the best.Perez-Reverte, before he took up writing full-time, was a war journalist; the list of those he covered includes Bosnia, Croatia, El Salvador, Lebanon, and the Sudan, among others. These are some of the bloodiest horrors of modern times, since too many of them were civil wars which are always the most vicious.The protagonist in Painter of Battles is Faulkes who, until very recently, has been a war photojournalist. Like Perez-Reverte, Faulkes has covered all the major and most bloody wars of his lifetime, and has been very successful, winning prizes for individual photographs and publishing books of his photos. But he is now retired. In his youth, he studied painting, but abandoned that when he realized he was not a top-flight artist. But now, he has taken up painting once more, this time to create a vast mural on the inside of an abandoned tower, which he has bought, on one of Spain’s capes. No ordinary mural, it depicts war in the form of battles, both from the standpoint of those who fight them and of those who suffer from them. It isn’t pretty.Then one day, as he is nearing completion, one of his old photographs walks into his life.That’s the matrix that Perez-Reverte uses in what is basically a staggeringly dark reflection on human nature as revealed through war. I found it shattering.There’s no escaping the speculation that this is the summing up of the author’s own experiences of 20th and 21st century horrors. I don’t see how anyone comes through such experiences truly whole. If the book is even a pale reflection of what happened to Perez-Revere, then he did not escape that fate.Because of its emphasis on painting, the book describes a number of artists and their own paintings of battles; it left me very curious about these works, and I do intend to follow that curiosity up as best I can, living as I do in a country that has no major art museum where major works of art can be viewed. But I will do so as best as I can on the Internet and by means of books. At least that is a life-affirming result of reading a book which is not.I personally view this as a major work, but it isn’t for everyone.