LOGO
Reply to Thread New Thread
Old 04-01-2009, 02:04 AM   #1
Texdolley

Join Date
Oct 2005
Posts
524
Senior Member
Default Vicente Blasco Iba?ez:The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse
Finished the book and unfortunately it didn't met my expectations from the beggining.

This is a novel about WWI and it tells a story of a french young man, Marcel who in the late 19th century travels to Argentina running away from the new founded monarchy. In South America he works for a wealthy Spanish landowner, he earns his confidence and ends up getting married with his daughter. At the same time, a german inmigrant, a musician who is teaching piano to the youngest daughter falls in love with her, and against the will of the father they get married too.
When the landowner dies, the fortune gets divided in equal parts to his two daughters. The german and his wife decide to go back to Europe, and after some time, when he already gave birth to two children in Argentina, Marcel decides to go back to France.

Then, in the old continent, the two families have a few encounters, already sparkled with the rivalry between germans and french years before WWI. Then, when the war begins, the two families have some of their relatives involved on it and there starts the war story and how it affects the life of the two families, focusing more on the family of Marcel.

The first part of the novels sets a very interesting introduction, and promises an excelent novel. However since the moment they go back to Europe I found it very linear and with nothing new to bring, a typical war novel.

Moreover, Blasco's ideology its very tendentious to the French side (Actually Blasco was invited by french president at that time to see the conflict and write something illustrating France's point of view) and I think it doesn't allow to have a serious and more realistic perspective of the conflict.

of a novel that could've been amazing
Texdolley is offline



Reply to Thread New Thread

« Previous Thread | Next Thread »

Currently Active Users Viewing This Thread: 1 (0 members and 1 guests)
 

All times are GMT +1. The time now is 06:52 PM.
Copyright ©2000 - 2012, Jelsoft Enterprises Ltd.
Search Engine Optimization by vBSEO 3.6.0 PL2
Design & Developed by Amodity.com
Copyright© Amodity