The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse by Vicente Blasco Ibáñez

Gripping international family saga of World War I

One of the joys of reading old books by dead guys is occasionally discovering a previously unfamiliar author whose work really speaks to me. With the novel The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, published in 1916, I feel like I have discovered such an author in Vicente Blasco Ibáñez (1867–1928), one of the more prominent men of letters in Spanish literature of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Blasco Ibáñez carries on the realist tradition epitomized by Honoré de Balzac and Émile Zola. Having survived Zola by a quarter of a century, he ushers Zola’s naturalism into the modern era without succumbing to artsy modernist aesthetics. The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse is a novel about World War I, published during the height of the conflict, and it is easily one of the best novels about that war that I have read.

Julio Desnoyers, a young man of French and Argentinian heritage, is returning to the former country after a sojourn in the latter. Julio can’t wait to get to Paris to reunite with his mistress, a married woman whose husband seems to have resigned himself to a divorce. The ship carrying Julio from the New World to the Old is a German vessel. The ubiquitous topic of conversation on board is whether war will break out in Europe. The German passengers on the ship reveal an aggressive and prideful anticipation of the war, in contrast to Julio’s more pacifistic attitude.

From there, the novel looks back in time tot the history of the Desnoyers family. Julio’s father, Marcelo Desnoyers, emigrated from France to Argentina during the Napoleonic era. Marcelo became the right-hand man of a rich Spanish-born rancher, and by marrying that rancher’s daughter, he became a very wealthy man himself. The family history in Argentina is an epic saga often told with a wry sense of humor, in which one can see the precursor of the Latin American family saga of Gabriel García Márquez’s novel One Hundred Years of Solitude—the so-called magic realist style, but without the “magic.” Much of the sense of humor disappears, however, when the focus of the novel turns to the war. The remainder of the novel is a gripping and often brutal exposé of the horrific realities of World War I. A relative of the Desnoyers marries into a German family, which sets up a clash of opposing viewpoints about the political situation in Europe. As one might expect of the time period, there is an anti-German slant to the book, but Blasco Ibáñez delivers a reasoned and realistic criticism of Germany rather than mere nationalistic caricature.

If you are looking for a novel about the military experience of the Great War, I would highly recommend Under Fire: The Story of a Squad by French author Henri Barbusse. Blasco Ibáñez’s Four Horsemen, on the other hand, is a novel about the civilian experience of the war. Both authors are pre-modern realists who tell their stories in the classic, now out-of-fashion style of straightforward, unostentatious prose that one finds in the works of Tolstoy or Zola, rather than the obliquely narrow and personalized narratives of the war you get from intentionally modernist writers like Ernest Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms or John Dos Passos’s Three Soldiers. Blasco Ibáñez isn’t interested in idiosyncratic perspectives of the war. Like Tolstoy or Zola might have done, he wants to encapsulate the entire political and social scope of the conflict, and he does a superb job of it, with neither the overblown romance of Boris Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago nor the didactic history lesson of Upton Sinclair’s World’s End. The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse strikes the perfect balance of providing the reader with a historical education, a broad international perspective on the war, and affecting moments of personal tragedy and triumph.

I can’t say enough good things about this impressive novel. After reading The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, I can’t wait to dive deeper into the complete works of Blasco Ibáñez