The Painter of Battles
Andrés Faulques, a world-renowned war photographer, has retired to a life of solitude on the Spanish coast. On the walls of a tower overlooking the sea, 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...
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Andrés Faulques, a world-renowned war photographer, has retired to a life of solitude on the Spanish coast. On the walls of a tower overlooking the sea, 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.
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Format: hardcover
ISBN:
9781400065981 (1400065984)
Publish date: 2008-01-08
Publisher: Random House, Inc.
Pages no: 211
Edition language: English
bookshelves: autumn-2013, fraudio, translation, tbr-busting-2013, art-forms, published-2006, spain, war, revenge, philosophy, teh-brillianz, mystery-thriller Read from October 07 to 09, 2013 Simon Vance reads.From the cover: Acclaimed author Arturo Perez-Reverte has earned a distinguished repu...
The Painter of Battles lives in a lighthouse, painting a mural of scenes of famous battles intermixed with personal horror from his own experiences. He is alone, until he is visited by a man from his past who comes to make him think about his life and his role in the atrocities that he experienced a...
This is a story that had to be written. The painter of battles used to be a photographer of battles. But after a time, there was a need for him to process all that he'd seen in war. So he bought a tower on a hill and proceeded to make a war mural to capture the realism of the geometry and laws of wa...