Reeds and Mud by Vicente Blasco Ibáñez

Compelling Spanish regional naturalism

Reeds and Mud, a novel by Spanish author Vicente Blasco Ibáñez, was originally published in 1902 under the Spanish title of Cañas y barro. Blasco Ibáñez was a realist writer, and sometimes a naturalist (a specific form of realism), and Reeds and Mud qualifies as both. He was born in Valencia, a city on the Mediterranean Coast of Eastern Spain, and most of his fiction takes place within that district. Reeds and Mud is set in the town of Palmar in the Albufera region of Valencia. The Albufera is a large lake or freshwater lagoon, surrounded by marshes and separated from the ocean by a thin strip of land. It is to these marshes that the title of the novel refers, as well as to the homes of the area’s inhabitants. At the time this story takes place, about half of Palmar’s residents are still living in traditional fishermen’s huts of reeds and mud, while the other half resides in more modern wood-frame houses.

For centuries, the primary mode of life in the Albufera has been fishing, with eels being particularly bountiful in these waters. The residents of Palmar also do quite a bit of hunting, though much of it in the form of poaching in a nearby forest where they’re not supposed to venture. At the time of this story, agriculture is starting to gain a foothold in the region. The novel focuses on three generations of one Palmar family. The grandfather, Tío Paloma, is an elderly boatman, fisherman, and hunter who embodies all the traditional customs and lifestyle of the Albufera. His son, Tío Tóni, on the other hand, dreams of being a successful landowner and struggles to coax a profitable crop out of the marshy soil. This contrast in lifestyles­—old ways vs. new, fishing vs. agriculture—causes conflict between father and son. Meanwhile, the grandson, Tonet, is a lazy ne’er-do-well who would prefer to avoid work altogether; neither fishing nor farming for him. His grandfather feels some affinity towards the young man, but his father considers him a disgrace..

In addition to the drama within the family, Tonet is involved in a love triangle that brings further conflict and suspense into the story. There’s more going on in this sunny fishing village than just picturesque rural living. Blasco Ibáñez turns over some stones to reveal the darker side of this community, and the story occasionally ventures into some frightening scenes. Naturalist authors like Emile Zola were often criticized for their vulgar and disturbing subject matter, but Blasco Ibáñez includes one image in this novel that is so graphic and horrifying I would be surprised if this book wasn’t banned by the censors of its day.

The Albufera region has no doubt changed much in the eleven decades since Blasco Ibáñez wrote this novel. What’s great about Reeds and Mud, in addition to its compelling story, is that it functions as a historical document of the people, customs, and natural environment­ of this specific time and place. That’s one of the valuable aspects of the naturalist novel—when done right, it functions as a sort of time-capsule for historic preservation, like a National Geographic article but deeper and more personally engaging. Almost every chapter of Reeds and Mud centers around a traditional public event, like a religious festival or the drawing of lots to assign fishing grounds. Instead of photographs, the reader gets the rich empirical description of reality characteristic of naturalist texts. Blasco Ibáñez was one of Spain’s great realist chroniclers, along with Emilia Pardo Bazán and Benito Peréz Galdos.

Since I discovered Blasco Ibáñez a couple years ago, he has become one of my go-to authors for fiction. I can always count on him for a rewarding read. As good as Reeds and Mud is, I like his novels The Cabin (La Barraca) (1898) and The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (1916) even better.   

Blood and Sand by Vicente Blasco Ibáñez

The Raging Bull of bullfighting

Blood and Sand, a novel by Spanish author Vicente Blasco Ibáñez, was published in 1908. In some English-language editions, the original Spanish title, Sangre y Arena, has been translated as Blood of the Arena, which isn’t entirely inappropriate, since this is a novel about bullfighting. Juan Gallardo is born the poor son of a cobbler. At a young age, he develops a fascination with bullfighting and dreams of being a matador. He gradually works his way up as a bush-league journeyman before getting his first big break in a big-city arena. With success comes fame and fortune, and all the vices and vicissitudes that go with it.

The first couple chapters of this novel read as if it might turn out to be one of those clichéd, romanticized portrayals shown in every bullfighting movie you’ve ever seen. In fact, however, the reverse is probably true: the familiar image of the matador has become stereotypical because so many storytellers have patterned their bullfighting narratives after Blood and Sand. The novel was adapted into at least half a dozen films from 1916 to 1989. Much like boxing stories in American literature and film, there’s a whole set of preconceived expectations and familiar plot elements attached to the sport of bullfighting. Blasco Ibáñez, however, is not only a realist writer but also a naturalist in the ultra-bluntly realistic style of Emile Zola, so he doesn’t settle for predictable, contrived storytelling. As long as we’re making analogies to American boxing films, this would be the Martin Scorsese’s Raging Bull of bullfighting. Blasco Ibáñez gives a much more complex and nuanced depiction of bullfighting than American authors like Ernest Hemingway (The Sun Also Rises) or James Michener (Mexico).

One area where Blasco Ibáñez tends to depart from realism and venture into more romanticized territory is his romantic subplots. He likes to put a femme fatale character into his books, and in that regard the love story here is very similar to that found in his 1900 novel Entre naranjos (a.k.a The Torrent). One aspect of Blood and Sand that I really like, however, is his examination of issues of class. Gallardo is born a peasant but works his way up to celebrity, which allows him to mingle with the aristocracy while never really being accepted into their ranks. The members of Gallardo’s support team, or cuadrilla—his banderilleras and picadores—live very working-class, proletarian lives compared to the wealthy matador they serve. Gallardo’s right-hand man, Nacional, is a socialist agitator. These elements of class commentary in the story give the reader an insightful glimpse into Spanish society of the time.

Rest assured that this novel isn’t just a glorification of bullfighting. For those who think bullfighting is a barbaric sport and are disgusted by its cruelty to animals, Blasco Ibáñez has you covered too. This is not a flattering depiction of the sport. Blasco Ibáñez explores the role of the bullfight as a cultural phenomenon, giving it its due consideration as a Spanish institution, but he also admits the sport’s needless brutality and pageant of bloodlust. He likens the corrida to a gladiatorial spectacle in which cattle and horses are the sacrificial victims. Again, like Zola, Blasco Ibáñez doesn’t shy away from the more coarse and disgusting aspects of his subject and at times will exaggerate them for visceral (sometimes literally) dramatic effect.

The last chapter of Blood and Sand is a little odd. It feels tacked onto the end and somewhat ambiguously detached from the chronology of the narrative. That’s a shame, because the rest of the novel is well-conceived and tautly plotted. I’ve only recently discovered Blasco Ibáñez, and I’ve been impressed by everything I’ve read by him. Blood and Sand is not his strongest novel—I would more readily recommend The Cabin (La Barraca) or The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse—but though it falls short of perfection, a subpar outing by Blasco Ibáñez is still better than at least 90 percent of the work of his contemporaries.   

A Brief Account of the Destruction of the Indies by Bartolomé de las Casas

Speaking truth to power in the 16th century

Perhaps a half a dozen contemporary book-length accounts of the Spanish conquest of Latin America have survived. These accounts now serve as foundational texts in Latin American history. Much of what we know about the early days of conquest and colonization come from just a few narratives, such as Bernal Díaz del Castillo’s True History of the Conquest of New Spain, the autobiographical Journey of Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca, and the Narrative of Some Things of New Spain by an anonymous member of Hernán Cortés’s army. Indigenous accounts of this period are even scarcer. One Spaniard, however, did stand up for the Native peoples of the Americas and documented their experience of oppression and genocide under the Spanish conquerors.

Bartolomé de las Casas (1484–1566) was among the first Spaniards to arrive in the New World. His father, who had served on one of Christopher Columbus’s voyages of exploration, brought his family across the Atlantic in 1502 to become colonists on the island of Hispaniola. At first, Bartolomé de las Casas lived on a farm with slaves and participated in raids and massacres of the Native population. In 1514, however, he had a change of heart and began campaigning to end slavery and the abuse of the Indigenous people of the Americas. He had been ordained a secular priest in 1507 and entered the Dominican order in 1522. De las Cases wrote A Brief Account of the Destruction of the Indies in 1542 and, during one of his trips back to Spain, presented the document to King Charles V of Spain and members of the Council of the Indies in hopes of influencing policy changes in Spain’s governing of the Americas. The Brief Account was published in book form in 1552.

The book is divided into chapters based on geographic location, starting with Hispaniola, Cuba, and other Caribbean islands. Mexico is divided into several chapters according to the provincial divisions of the time. Nicaragua, Guatemala, Venezuela, Peru, and the Rio de la Plata region (near Buenos Aires) are all covered. In each district, de las Casas details how the Spaniards subdued, persecuted, and tortured the Native population. De las Casas traveled to quite a few of these locations himself, so much of his testimony is based on first-hand knowledge. Some chapters, however, are drawn from letters or previous documents written by other sympathetic clergymen. De las Casas cites a lot of population and death statistics, but his figures should be taken with a grain of salt considering the difficulty of achieving accurate numbers in those times.

The historical importance of this document is immeasurable, but is it a pleasant read? Of course not. It’s horrifying and demoralizing, but that goes with the territory of this subject matter. De las Casas, as an author, also has some shortcomings. If you’re expecting an eloquent philosophical essay condemning slavery, like someone might have written in the Enlightenment Era, you’ll be disappointed. The text is basically just a catalogue of atrocities listed one after the other, with very little pausing for reflection and almost no conclusive summation. Some of the more interesting passages relate how groups of Indians fought back against the conquistadores. Although such efforts were ultimately crushed, they do indicate that the Native Americans were not merely passive and ignorant victims. One odd authorial choice that de las Casas makes is to omit the names of the perpetrators of these war crimes. Instead, he’ll use phrases like “a certain tyrant” or “this captain” or “that pirate.” In some cases, one can tell when he’s talking about Columbus, Hernán Cortés, or Ponce de Leon, for example, but one would have to be a professor of Latin American history to identify all of the unnamed persons he accuses in this book.

De las Casas has his share of critics. One measure he advocated to lesson the oppression of the Indians was to increase the African slave trade. Whether or not the Brief Account really brought about tangible changes in Spanish America, his speaking truth to power and exposing these crimes is commendable. If nothing else, we owe de las Casas a debt of gratitude for the historical documentation he has provided of this time and place.   

Cubism in Color: The Still Lifes of Juan Gris, edited by Nicole R. Myers and Katherine Rothkopf

The beautiful book his work deserves

The modernist painting style of cubism is generally considered to have been invented jointly by painters Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque around 1907. Most art aficionados, if questioned for a third artist in that movement, would call up the name of Juan Gris. In fact, though Gris followed in the footsteps of Picasso and Braque, some (myself included) consider Gris to have been the one who really took cubism to its creative apex. Gris pushed the stylistic experiments in form, structure, and color farther than his better-known contemporaries, and in the process managed to produce many beautiful paintings. Even those who can’t stand cubism (and that’s probably the majority of the world’s population) might very well enjoy looking at a Juan Gris painting.

The still life, usually an arrangement of objects on a table, was a common subject matter for cubist artists and a particular specialty of Gris’s. Now his work in that area gets its deserved recognition with the beautifully produced coffee table book Cubism in Color: The Still Lifes of Juan Gris, edited by Nicole R. Myers of the Dallas Museum of Art and Katherine Rothkopf of the Baltimore Museum of Art. This book was published in 2021 by Yale University Press to coincide with an exhibition of Gris’s still lifes organized by those two museums.

This book is not intended to be a comprehensive biography or retrospective on Juan Gris. That has already been done at least twice, by Antonio Gaya Nuño in 1986 and by Christopher Green in 1992. This book is meant to focus solely on Gris’s still lifes, but it nevertheless does contain a biological overview and a fair share of scholarly content on Gris’s work. The assortment of essays included, however, is a bit random. Myers delivers a truly excellent essay examining how Gris went about planning and executing his still life paintings. For anyone who paints or draws, this chapter reads like a behind-the-scenes exposé into Gris’s methods and materials. Another essay is a string of brief institutional histories of every Spanish museum that owns a work by Juan Gris. It’s hard to see how that’s useful; wouldn’t a list have sufficed? Another essay explores the influence of Gris on abstract artists in South America. The connection feels only tenuously established, but this chapter did bring to my attention some Latin American artists with whom I was previously unfamiliar.

While the essays are hit-and-miss, the images strike the bullseye time and time again. The text divides Gris’s tragically brief career into five distinct stages. All of those stages are well-represented by selected artworks, and one can clearly see Gris’s progression as an artist over time. The paintings are all beautifully reproduced, most of them appearing at full-page size. The photography of the artworks and the quality of the printing are impeccable. When it comes to art publications, Yale University Press always makes a quality product.

I still think Green and Gaya Nuño’s books are better overall volumes on Gris’s life and career, but Cubism in Color is a great addition to the literature on Gris’s art. I doubt any art lover would ever say, “I’m of fan of Gris, but I don’t like his still lifes.” Still lifes were so integral to his thought and vision as an artist. This book celebrates Gris’s innovative visual experimentation and sublime talent for composition. His still lifes deserve a great showcase in print, and that’s what they’re given here.

Flowers, 1914

The Violin, 1916

Still Life with a Bottle of Bordeaux, 1919

The Open Window, 1921

The Manuscript Found in Saragossa by Jan Potocki

Swapping spicy stories in Spain

Jan Potocki (1761–1815) was a Polish nobleman and world traveler who published several travel memoirs in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. He wrote all of his books in the French language. Potocki wrote one work of fiction, a unique and baffling picaresque novel entitled The Manuscript Found in Saragossa. Portions of the book were published as early as 1805, but I don’t believe the entire novel was published until 1847, more than three decades after the author’s death.

The Manuscript Found in Saragossa is similar in conception to The Canterbury Tales or The Decameron. The narrator, Alphonse van Worden, is an officer in the Walloon Guards, a unit of the Spanish Army composed of troops from Wallonia (the Southern, French-speaking, predominantly Catholic portion of Belgium). Van Worden is traveling across Spain to get to Madrid. Over the course of his trip, he accumulates a diverse group of traveling companions. Every night the party stops at an inn or a camp, where they exchange fantastic stories of their lives. The book is divided into sixty-six chapters documenting the sixty-six days of van Worden’s journey. That doesn’t mean, however, that the book is comprised of sixty-six stories. Some stories go on for dozens of chapters, and most of the stories veer off into extended digressions that amount to stories-within-stories. At one point, for example, you’re reading a gypsy chief tell the story of Don Busqueros telling the story of Señor Cornádez telling the story of a pilgrim named Blas Hervas telling the story of his father, Diego Hervas.

The tales told are not confined to Spain but take place all over Europe, the Middle East, and even Mexico. The characters represent multiple nationalities and ethnic groups. Presumably the author was a Christian, but many of the characters depicted here are Jews and Muslims. Potocki does not stoop to negative stereotypes or racism but does emphasize the exotic, mythical aspects of other races and cultures, like all Jews are mystics or all Muslims seem like they stepped out of The Arabian Nights. One recurring character is a “Wandering Jew” who is possibly immortal and relates events from the Bible as if he witnessed them firsthand. Through his characters, Potocki demonstrates an admirable breadth of knowledge. When a mathematician is telling a story, for example, Potocki discourses intelligently about geometry. When a cabalist is doing the talking, Potocki includes just enough details on the occult. Potocki even manages to work some Enlightenment philosophy and science into the narrative. The text is chock full of delightful details.

You’d never guess that this book was written in the early 19th century. Many aspects of the stories told resemble pulp fiction of a later era. One of the funny things about this novel is the number of threesomes that take place. Threesomes with cousins. Threesomes with (maybe) ghosts or demons. A foursome with mother and daughters. Potocki was certainly no prude, and the way he doubles down on shameless titillation indicates that he was no literary snob either.

This book is ingeniously constructed but unfortunately confusing as hell. The story is as complicated as The Count of Monte Cristo, but unlike Alexandre Dumas, Potocki doesn’t leave the reader enough bread crumbs to navigate what’s going on. The stories-within-stories structure is disorienting. Characters assume false identities, swap genders, or show up under different names. You have to keep track of everyone’s noble, clerical, or military titles. All of the stories are somehow connected, but how is not always clear until later in the book. In order to really make sense of this novel, one would have to take notes and draw charts, family trees, historical timelines, maps, etc. Who wants to go through all that just to read a work of fiction? I admire what Potocki has done, and I know there is more to this novel than what I got out of it, but it was an ordeal to get through. I might give this book another try someday when I’m prepared to do the work required, but for now I’m kind of glad I’m done with it.

The Torrent by Vicente Blasco Ibáñez

Spanish politician drowns in love

Vicente Blasco Ibáñez was a prominent figure in Spanish literature in the late 19th and early 20th centuries and also found some international success through English translation. His novel Entre naranjos (“Between Orange Trees”) was published in 1900. It was translated into English as The Torrent. The Spanish title refers to the orange orchards of Valencia, the province of Spain where Blasco Ibáñez was born and raised and where this novel is set. The English title, The Torrent, is mostly metaphorical, as in a torrent of emotions. A flood does take place over the course of one or two chapters, but it is not the main focus of the novel.

Rafael Brull is the pride of his hometown of Alcira, in Valencia near the East Coast of Spain. He represents his district as a deputy in the Spanish Cortes (parliament) in Madrid. Rafael inherited his political clout from his grandfather and father. Grandpa Don Jaime was a shrewd wheeler-dealer, and papa Don Ramón was a macho gangster, but Rafael is a kinder, gentler sort of politician and somewhat of a pawn in his family’s game. The real political strategist in the family is Rafael’s mother Doña Bernarda, assisted by the family’s “fixer,” Don Andrès, both of whom supervise and guide the dutiful Rafael’s every move. Needless to say, the young deputy would be quite a catch for some lucky young lady of Alcira. Rafael’s mother has arranged a marriage for him with the daughter of the richest man in the region. One day, however, an exotic and beautiful woman arrives in town: Leonora, a world famous opera star who captivates Rafael’s attention. His mother disapproves of the woman, as the townspeople see her as a loose, libertine adventuress. Rafael, head over heels in love, is willing to risk all for Leonora, but despite constantly toying with him, she denies him any reciprocation and insists that they only be friends.

In his early works, at least, Blasco Ibáñez wrote in a naturalist style likely influenced by French writer Émile Zola. Zola is my favorite novelist (I have reviewed his complete works at this blog), and Blasco Ibáñez is the one writer I’ve found who can do naturalism just about as well as Zola, as proven by such excellent novels as The Cabin and The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. Zola himself didn’t always hit the bullseye with his naturalism but sometimes ventured into more romantic, melodramatic, and less realist works, particularly when love affairs are concerned, as in his novels The Kill and The Sin of Father Mouret. Such is the case here as well with Blasco Ibáñez’s The Torrent. The character of Leonora is a bit over the top. She reads more like someone’s ideal of a femme fatale than a real person. Rafael’s abject enslavement to her may have been more accurate to chivalrous love affairs of 1900, but it’s hard to identify with today.

There are basically two main plots entwined throughout the book. One is Rafael’s love for Leonora. The other is his political career. This latter aspect of the book is handled well, with pure naturalistic realism. Blasco Ibáñez presents a cynical backroom view of political machinations that points out the problems with party politics, political machines, and nepotistic dynasties. When reading the works of Blasco Ibáñez, I can’t help thinking that he must have influenced the writers who arose during the Latin American literary “boom” of the 1960s and ‘70s. The Torrent’s political narrative calls to mind some of Peruvian author Mario Vargas Llosa’s political works like The Feast of the Goat, and Rafael’s father Don Ramón shares some character traits with Mexican author Juan Rulfo’s Pedro Páramo. That’s just me drawing parallels, however, not actual evidence of direct influence.

The Torrent is not Blasco Ibáñez’s best work, but it is still clearly the work of an expert practitioner in the art form of the novel. Having read three of his books so far, I have only dipped my toe into the depths of his body of literature, but I am looking forward to diving deeper into that pool and discovering more long-lost treasures.  

The Cabin by Vicente Blasco Ibáñez

Short but powerful naturalist novel of Spain

Spanish author Vicente Blasco Ibáñez (1867–1928) published his fifth novel, La Barraca, in 1898. In English, the book is titled The Cabin or The Shack. The novel takes place in a huerta, or farming community, outside the city of Valencia, which is located on the Mediterranean Coast of Spain. The farmers who comprise the novel’s cast do not own the land on which they live and work. They rent from a landlord who lives in the city. Most of the families in the huerta are struggling to make ends meet, and many owe debts and back rent to the landowner.

In the opening chapter, Pepeta, a farmwife, brings her goods to market in Valencia. In the city, she runs into a former neighbor who is now a prostitute. Pepeta remembers when this young woman was once a respectable farmer’s daughter. This inspires a flashback to a momentous event in the history of the huerta. A poor, hardworking farmer named Barret (the prostitute’s father) suffers the persecution of his oppressive landlord, Don Salvador, which leads to a violent altercation between peasant and master. The Barrets are driven from their land, leaving their farm and its barraca vacant for many years. The other residents of the huerta see this unoccupied, unproductive land as a symbol of rebellious pride, a thorn in the side of the rich landowners. One day, however, a new family appears at the huerta, their belongings in tow. To everyone’s surprise, the newcomers take up residence on the old Barret farm. Much like scabs would be viewed by strikers, these interlopers are treated with hostility and animosity by their neighbors. Although the new resident, Batiste, is just a poor and industrious farmer struggling to succeed like everyone else, he and his family are shunned and antagonized by the other families of the huerta.

Though largely forgotten by American readers these days (who would be hard-pressed to name any Spanish novel other than Don Quixote), Blasco Ibáñez was highly respected and widely read by English-language readers and critics of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The English edition of The Cabin alone sold over a million copies. Blasco Ibáñez wrote in the style of naturalism that was forged and popularized decades earlier by French author Émile Zola. In fact, Blasco Ibáñez is the first author I’ve come across who can do Zola’s style as well as Zola himself. That’s not to say that the Spanish author is merely an imitator of his predecessor. Active roughly a quarter century after Zola, Blasco Ibáñez brings naturalism into the modern world of Ernest Hemingway and John Dos Passos.

Naturalism is a form of realism that aims to document modern life in rich detail and unflinching verisimilitude without shying away from subject matter traditionally considered difficult, ugly, or unseemly. Drawing from modern science and social science, naturalism generally depicts its characters as not being masters of their own destiny but rather as slaves to forces of nature and nurture—evolution, heredity, economics, politics—that shape their identities and influence the course of their lives. This is apparent in La Barraca as animosity and violence escalate the Barrets and their neighbors, when everyone’s real enemy is the system of feudalistic peonage that enslaves them.

The joy of reading old books by dead guys is that every once in a while you discover a writer whose work you really love, and that author has twenty or thirty books that you’ve never heard of that you can now look forward to reading. Such is the case with Blasco Ibáñez, my latest discovery. The Cabin is the second of his novels that I’ve read, and both have been excellent. This is a short novel, smaller in size and more intimate in scale than his epic The Four Horseman of the Apocalypse, but a lot of emotional power is packed into this small package.

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 to 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.

The Hive by Camilo José Cela

Over 300 characters in post-Civil War Spain

Spanish author Camilo José Cela won the 1989 Nobel Prize in Literature. His 1950 novel La Colmena, published in English as The Hive, is one of his most highly regarded works. Because of censorship under the Franco regime in Spain, the novel was first published in Argentina.

Doña Rosa owns a cafe/bar in Madrid. This establishment serves as the hub of the novel, where the denizens of its neighborhood rendezvous and converse. Spokes radiate outward from this hub, however, as we also get to see the characters in their homes, at work, or at other sites in the city, where the reader meets everyone’s spouses, siblings, and children. The novel contains over 300 characters who are all interconnected through a complex web of relationships. One would really need to construct some kind of chart or diagram to keep them all straight. That’s one of the things that I don’t like about the novel, because to some extent I feel that if the reader is required to do that sort of thing just to figure out what’s going on, then the author hasn’t really done their job. On the other hand, the reader really has to admire the ingenuity and intricacy of Cela’s complex literary construction. It’s as if French author Honoré de Balzac crammed all of the characters of his Comédie Humaine into the pages of one volume. The result is a collage of experiences that is greater than the sum of its parts.

The story takes place in 1943, shortly after the Spanish Civil War, which is referred to throughout the book simply as “the war.” Through the lives and interactions of these myriad characters, Cela creates a vivid document of what life was like in Madrid at that time. The novel is not critical of the Franco regime because Cela himself was a Francoist. I don’t believe Franco is even mentioned in the book; if so, no more than once or twice. The Hive was banned in Spain because of its sexual content, not because of any political commentary. The impressions of urban Spain that comprise the novel, however, do not paint a positive portrait of this time in Spain’s history. The overwhelming societal image one gets from The Hive is one of economic insecurity. Many of the characters are poor or struggling to get by. They must employ crafty strategies just to find the money for a cup of coffee or a cigarette. Everyone’s looking for an angle to survive and thrive. The women in this novel, in particular, are in dire straits, forced to work as prostitutes or attach themselves as mistresses to paying gentlemen. Married or not, just about every man in this book has a mistress. The depiction of morality and sexuality in this book is not judgmental but rather matter-of-fact in its bluntness and pragmatism.

The tone of the novel is darkly satirical. Among the 300 characters, Cela is representing realistic types of people one would find in Madrid, but he’s also making fun of them, caricaturing them. The feeling is something similar to one of George Grosz’s expressionistic cartoons of a crowded cityscape filled with ugly decadence. To really understand everything Cela has to say in this novel, I think you would need to have lived through ‘40s or ‘50s Madrid. I certainly don’t claim to have gotten all of it. The ending, in particular, left me scratching my head. Someone’s in trouble with the law, but why exactly? To an outsider like me, however, this novel really succeeds at imparting a vivid impression of what life was like in this particular time and place. When I read foreign literature in translation, that’s what I’m looking for. Through Cela’s artful kaleidoscopic structure, The Hive provides a full-immersion excursion into post–Civil War Spain and delivers a memorable reading experience.

Juan Gris by Juan Antonio Gaya Nuño

A lovely showcase of the cubist master’s work

The Spanish painter Juan Gris did not invent the pictorial style of cubism, but he perfected it to its zenith. While Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque moved on to other modes of expression, Gris devoted his whole career to the visual language of cubism, creating some of the most ingenious, intricate, and aesthetically stimulating works in the cubist idiom.

The book simply entitled Juan Gris by Spanish art historian Juan Antonio Gaya Nuño was published in 1986 by a Spanish publisher, Ediciones Polígrafa, but they also published an English-language edition. The book opens with 25 pages of nothing but text, set so densely that it is painful to the eyes. Beyond that, however, the remaining hundred pages are filled with reproductions of Gris’s work. The text by Gaya Nuño presents an informative biography of the artist. It is unlikely that Gaya Nuño ever met Gris, who died young, but the historian did interview some of the artist’s contemporaries and friends in his research for this essay. Written from a Spanish perspective, the text contemplates and emphasizes Gris’s Spanishness and to what extent he expressed the national spirit of his homeland in his works. Gaya Nuño’s assessment of Gris’s relationship to Picasso is somewhat surprising. According to this account, Gris looked up to Picasso as a mentor and idol, but Picasso looked down on Gris and resented any critical acclaim the younger artist received.

While the text is educational, the main attraction here is the images. The book reproduces 166 of Gris’s artworks. About three-quarters of them are printed in color, and many occupy a full page. The photographs of the artworks would have been supplied by the individual museums that held them, so the quality of the photographs varies in terms of lighting and clarity of focus, but on the whole the images are reproduced beautifully. They are presented in chronological order, even starting with several examples of Gris’s day-job work as a graphic artist and illustrator. Some of his theatrical designs for stage sets and costumes appear towards the end of the book. Over the course of this retrospective, one can see Gris’s style develop from an analytical cubism based on the ideas of Picasso and Braque to a more idiosyncratic synthetic cubism later in his career. From the very beginning, however, Gris’s work exhibits a lyricism, experimentation, and playfulness that distinguishes him from his cubist contemporaries.

I know of two other fine illustrated books that have been published on Gris. Christopher Green’s book entitled Juan Gris was published in 1992 by Yale University Press. James Thrall Soby’s 1958 book, also entitled Juan Gris, was published by the Museum of Modern Art. You can find a digitized version of the latter book on the MOMA website. The Green book is much stronger on text, with lots of biographical content and analysis and criticism of Gris’s work. If you want a thorough scholarly overview of Gris’s career, Green’s is probably your book. Soby’s book is similar in size and number of photographs to Gaya Nuño’s, but, being printed in 1958, more of the pictures are in black and white. If you’re a fan of Gris’s work, you really can’t go wrong with any one of these three. Gaya Nuño’s book, however, may be the best illustrated of the three.

Violin and Guitar, 1913, oil on canvas, 100 x 65.5 cm

The Checkerboard, 1915, oil on canvas, 92 x 73 cm

The Violin, 1916, oil on wood, 116.5 x 73 cm

Guitar, Bottle, and Glass, 1917, oil on canvas, 73 x 92 cm

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Book of the Knowledge of All the Kingdoms, Lands, and Lordships That Are in the World, and the Arms and Devices of Each Land and Lordship, or of the Kings and Lords Who Possess Them: Written by a Spanish Franciscan in the Middle of the XIV Century, edited by Marcos Jímenez de la Espada

Rapid-fire medieval travelogue of nations, cities, and flags

Written by an unknown Spanish Franciscan friar around the year 1360, Book of the Knowledge of All the Kingdoms, Lands, and Lordships That are in the World . . . (the title goes on) was first published in 1877 by Marcos Jímenez de la Espada, a Spanish explorer and zoologist who edited and annotated the original manuscript. The book was then translated into English by Sir Clements Markham and published in 1912 by the Hakluyt Society, a British organization devoted to publishing the historic accounts of explorers and world travelers. The unknown Franciscan was indeed a world traveler of the first order, if his account is to be believed, as the voyages he recounts in this volume took him all over Europe, Africa, and Asia to just about every nation in the known world at that time.

The manuscript is not dated, but the editors were able to establish a date of 1350 to 1360 based on historical events and the reign of monarchs discussed in the narrative. The Franciscan gives a very rapid-fire account of his extensive travels. Most of the text is a string of names of nations, kingdoms, and cities visited. He ends his account of each kingdom with a description of its flag. Given the many thousands of miles covered, this is a brief and not very detailed travelogue, but the Franciscan does manage to work in some fascinating details about the lands visited and their histories. In the book’s introduction, Markham explains that it is difficult to tell whether the Franciscan actually visited all the nations he discusses or if some are described from second-hand information. The narrative is certainly not entirely factual, as it does include some biblical and legendary content, such as references to Prester John, Gog and Magog, a race of headless people with faces in their chests (akephaloi) or “long faces like dogs” (cynocephali), and an earthly paradise at the Antarctic pole. One pleasantly surprising aspect of the book is the medieval author’s lack of racism in describing the myriad peoples of the world.

In addition to the verbal narrative of the Book of the Knowledge, the Franciscan also sketched the flags or arms of all the nations he visited. (I assume the images included in the 1912 edition are not his original drawings but rather reproductions cleaned up for publication.) In the field of vexillology (the study of flags), this is the earliest comprehensive source on flags of the world. When National Geographic published their special flag issue in October 1917 they included an article on this book and its flag drawings. Because the Franciscan’s travel narrative is so brief, and only provides a few sentences on each of the destinations visited, the flags may be the most valuable historical resource in this manuscript.

Many of the place names in the book are unrecognizable today because they are antiquated or misspelled, but that adds medieval color to the reading experience. For example, Ungria is Hungary; Catayo is Cathay, another name for China; the Himalaya are referred to as the Caspian Mountains; the Caspian Sea is the Sea of Sara. In most cases the editor’s notes clarify the locations referred to by the Franciscan, although the identity of some are undetermined. The Hakluyt edition is about 180 pages, but the Franciscan’s travelogue is only 62 pages, plus 20 pages of images, the rest being the introduction, indexes, and a catalog of other Hakluyt publications. This book can be downloaded for free in pdf format from HathiTrust. Geography buffs will enjoy it, especially those with a particular interest in flags and their history.
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One of twenty plates in the book:

Hernando Colón’s New World of Books: Toward a Cartography of Knowledge by José María Pérez Fernández and Edward Wilson-Lee

Pioneering information science in a remarkable Renaissance library

Hernando Colón was the second, and illegitimate, son of Christopher Columbus. He also wrote one of the first published biographies of his illustrious father. Hernando, however, was also an important man in his own right, an accomplished scholar, and a collector of books who assembled an ambitious research library of over 15,000 volumes. In 2018, author Edward Wilson-Lee published a very intriguing biography of Hernando entitled The Catalogue of Shipwrecked Books. My only complaint about that biography was that I wished it had focused more on Hernando’s library. Well, my wish has been granted, and then some, with the 2021 publication of Hernando Colón’s New World of Books by Wilson-Lee and José María Pérez Fernández.

While The Catalogue of Shipwrecked Books was aimed at a more general reading audience, Hernando Colón’s New World of Books reads like a scholarly monograph aimed at an audience of Renaissance historians and rare book librarians. It will also appeal, however, to general readers (like myself) with an avid enthusiasm for bibliographic history and a high tolerance for arcane minutiae regarding books and libraries. Hernando wasn’t just a collector of books; he was an obsessive organizer and cataloger of information. The various schemes he invented to catalog, summarize, and access the books in his massive collection might just make him the most important figure in library cataloging between Kallimachos and the Dewey Decimal System. Pérez Fernández and Wilson-Lee examine Hernando’s numerous projects of information management. They point out how his methods were manifestations of the spirit of Renaissance Humanism yet also ahead of their time in how Hernando ordered, categorized, and made sense of the world. To their credit, the authors do not hammer home this thesis relentlessly like many scholarly monographs do. In fact, any overarching argument often seems lost in a morass of detail. Nevertheless, bibliophiles will find it a pleasurable and fascinating morass of detail.

This book is loaded with information on how Hernando established his library and purchased his books. The authors explain how he adapted existing Renaissance networks and mechanisms of international trade and finance to gather and circulate information rather than money. Hernando was also involved in a massive cartographic project to reconcile and consolidate various existing maps and explorer logs into one cohesive and authoritative master map, as well as a pet project of his own to gather detailed geographic information on all the towns in Spain. Pérez-Fernández and Wilson-Lee delve deeply into Hernando’s intricate practices of cataloging and abstracting (in his Book of Epitomes) the volumes in his collection. They also provide a history of what happened to the library after Hernando’s death. The text closes with a handful of important primary source documents either written by Hernando or pertaining to his library. The most interesting of these is the Memoria written by Hernando’s head librarian Juan Pérez, who provides even more delightful details on the workings of the library.

Hernando Colón’s New World of Books is not for the casual reader. By all means read The Catalogue of Shipwrecked Books first, if you haven’t done so already. If you find that book as interesting as I did, and you want a whole lot more information on Hernando and his library, then and only then is this the book for you. Those who dare enter here, however, will be happy to get lost in Hernando’s library. The reader will gain a profound admiration for this important unsung Renaissance man and wonder why the memory of his magnificent library has faded into obscurity.
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The Family of Pascual Duarte by Camilo José Cela

Inside the mind of a murderer

The Family of Pascual Duarte, published in 1942, is the debut novel of Spanish author Camilo José Cela, who would go on to win the 1989 Nobel Prize in Literature. The novel is written in the form of a memoir by a death row inmate. A preface explains that this prisoner left the manuscript behind at the time of his execution. Pascual Duarte, the narrator, states from the very beginning that he has been imprisoned for committing a murder, and the reader waits for the details of that crime to be revealed as Duarte relates his life story. The dark tale he tells provides a glimpse into a mind gradually descending into insanity.

Pascual lives in Southwestern Spain, near the Portuguese border. Though I have limited knowledge of Spanish geography, Cela makes it sound like this region is far from financially affluent and somewhat of a Wild West compared to the sophisticated civilization of Madrid. Little is specified about Pascual’s means of making a living, but it is clear he lives a hard life replete with alcohol and violence. His mother abuses him physically and verbally. Perhaps the only bright spot in Pascual’s family life is his friendly relationship with his sister, but she leaves the home to work as a prostitute. Pascual and his family are plagued by death, particularly the deaths of children, which brings about a sort of antagonistic relationship between Pascual and fate itself. As he endures what he perceives as divine persecution, he exhibits violent tendencies that only grow more intense as the book progresses, thus foreshadowing his drive to commit murder.

The Family of Pascual Duarte calls to mind Albert Camus’s novel The Stranger, which was published the same year. Both Pascual Duarte and The Stranger’s Meursault try to make sense of a senseless universe in which they are seemingly driven by social, economic, and hereditary forces to commit crimes that marginalize them as the deviants of humanity. Duarte is driven mad by the sheer pointlessness of an indiscriminately harsh existence that yields no reward. While Camus approaches his narrative with a tone of ironically deadpan nonchalance, Cela’s view into Pascual’s mind is harsher and more disturbing. It calls to mind the brutally frank and bleak investigations into the criminal mind that one finds in Georges Simenon’s darker psychological novels like Dirty Snow and The Reckoning.

Cela has crafted a near-perfect novel. Its main fault is its ending. Rather than leading the reader all the way to the gallows, Pascual’s autobiographical narrative ends far short of his execution. Thus, many of the questions raised in the book’s introductory chapters remain unanswered, leaving the reader feeling a bit cheated. Perhaps this is intentional on Cela’s part, however. In this way the reader suffers a taste of the vindictive arbitrariness of events that has plagued Pascual throughout his life of bitter disappointments.

Many years ago I read Cela’s novel The Hive. While I found much to appreciate in that book, it contains a fair amount of political content that I couldn’t fully understand without an informed knowledge of the Spanish Civil War and its aftermath. The Family of Pascual Duarte, on the other hand, revolves around more universal themes of life and death, love and family, crime and punishment, obsession and insanity. Despite the dark circumstances of Pascual’s life and his status as a transgressor on the fringes of society, the reader can’t help but sympathize and identify with the underlying humanity of Cela’s tragic protagonist.
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The Journey of Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca and His Companions from Florida to the Pacific, 1528-1536 by Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca

Harrowing trek across the American continent

In 1527, Spain sent a party of 600 soldiers and colonists to America to explore Florida and the Gulf Coast. The voyage was led by Pánfilo de Narváez and thus dubbed the Narváez Expedition. Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca was named treasurer and second in command of the expedition. After stopping at established Spanish settlements in Hispaniola and Cuba, the party’s ships entered Tampa Bay in April 1528, where a group disembarked and began exploring the Florida coast on foot and horse. Through a series of unfortunate events and poor decisions, the landing party became separated from their ships, never to see them again. If they ever hoped to return to civilization, their only recourse was to head West towards Mexico in hopes of reaching existing Spanish settlements. Very few members of the Narváez expedition survived this arduous journey, but Cabeza de Vaca was one who did, making it all the way to the California coast and down to Mexico City. Afterwards, he wrote a narrative account of his journey from memory. This work was originally published in Spain in 1542 as La relación de Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca. The English translation by Fanny Bandelier was published in 1904.

Cabeza de Vaca’s account is a harrowing story of death and deprivation in which scores of Spaniards succumbed to starvation, drowning, disease, and cannibalism. The way he tells it, one would think there was nothing to eat in America in the early 16th century. Even the Indigenous populations he encounters are mostly struggling for existence. Cabeza de Vaca and his companions encountered numerous Native peoples, some hostile and some friendly. The hostile tribes killed his countrymen or enslaved them for years, while the friendly Indians sometimes nearly worshipped the Spaniards as faith healers and messengers sent by the gods. Cabeza de Vaca’s encounters with Native tribes are the most interesting and valuable aspect of his narrative. Though not without his Christian prejudices, Cabeza de Vaca shows a curiosity, sensitivity, and tolerance toward Native American cultures that was a marked departure from the prevailing genocidal attitude of the conquistadors and early missionaries toward the Indigenous inhabitants of the Americas. As the prototypical anthropologist of the New World, Cabeza de Vaca left behind an invaluable document of the state of Native civilizations at this early period in colonial history.

All his merits as an explorer and observer, however, do not make Cabeza de Vaca a great writer. As read through Bandelier’s translation, this is often a convoluted and confusing text. It must always be kept in mind that Cabeza de Vaca wrote this account from memory, years after the events depicted, which calls its accuracy and reliability into question. Also, most of the places he explored were unnamed at the time, making it difficult to tell exactly where many of the events he relates took place. The names he gives for the Native tribes may be questionable as well. Probably the best way to read this work would be in a recent, heavily annotated edition, where one might get the benefit of professional anthropologists’ and geographers’ insights, as opposed to the public domain text by Bandelier, which provides very little historical context.

Nevertheless, Cabeza de Vaca’s journey makes for a fascinating read, both as a historical document and as an exploration adventure story. This is a must-read primary source for anyone interested in Native American history or Spain’s colonization of the New World.
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The Catalogue of Shipwrecked Books: Christopher Columbus, His Son, and the Quest to Build the World’s Greatest Library by Edward Wilson-Lee

Bites off a little more than it can chew
Many histories have been written about Christopher Columbus and his voyages to America. One of the first books to tell his story was written by his own son, Hernando Colón (a.k.a. Ferdinand Columbus), who accompanied his father on his fourth voyage to the New World. Hernando, however, was more than just his father’s son. He led an astonishing life of his own, which author Edward Wilson-Lee chronicles in The Catalogue of Shipwrecked Books, published in 2018.

Hernando was the second, and illegitimate, son of Christopher Columbus. As a youth, while his father was off exploring the New World for King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella of Spain, Hernando was a page in the court of their son, Prince Juan. He spent much of his adult life traveling around Europe with the court of King Charles V, the Holy Roman Emperor. Hernando was an accomplished scholar, author, diplomat, geographer, and cartographer, but his real love was collecting books and printed pamphlets. He established a library in Seville that amounted to more than 15,000 volumes. A true Renaissance man, Hernando attempted to amass a universal collection that would comprehensively encompass all fields of knowledge and culture in all languages.

There’s no question that Hernando Colón led a fascinating life, but in this book his story is somewhat smothered under too much historical context. Wilson-Lee thinks the reader needs to know the life story of every pope and prince in Renaissance Europe, which results in countless tangents that distract from the primary narrative of Hernando, his family, and his library. Although I enjoy reading exploration narratives and explorer biographies, my primary interest in this book was Hernando’s library, which is really what makes his story so unique. After covering Columbus’s voyages, Wilson-Lee doesn’t really even begin to get into Hernando’s bibliophilia until about page 150. Even then, he only gradually eases into Hernando’s collecting habits, while the history of the library competes with all the other threads of political, religious, and legal history. The last few chapters, however, focus almost exclusively on Hernando’s library and art collection.

Hernando was not only an obsessive collector, he was also an obsessive cataloger. The numerous lists and annotated bibliographies he compiled were the precursors of the card catalogs, bibliographic metadata, and search engines employed by modern librarians. Wilson-Lee describes at length the various catalogs that Hernando created for his collections, but it would have been far more effective if he had excerpted a page or two from each list so the reader could get a better idea of each cataloging system and its entries. Wilson-Lee makes much of the fact that the Renaissance was an era in which humanist scholars strove to bring order to our understanding of nature and the universe. Thus, every time Hernando learns something or writes something down he is said to be “ordering the world.” Wilson-Lee hammers this point home so relentlessly that the text often reads more like a dissertation than a trade book for the general public.

The story of Hernando’s battle to save his father’s reputation and legacy deserves a book of its own. So does his quest to build the world’s greatest library. When the two are crammed together into one volume, while also trying to summarize the entire Renaissance history of Western Europe, everything gets short-changed in the process. Nevertheless, The Catalogue of Shipwrecked Books still delivers a great deal of fascinating information on early print culture and the intellectual history of Renaissance Europe. Wilson-Lee also helpfully provides ample bibliographic references for the reader to launch further research into Hernando and his library. Anyone interested in Columbus or the history of books will find this a very stimulating and informative read.
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