Arturo Pérez-Reverte


Arturo Pérez-Reverte Gutiérrez is a Spanish novelist and journalist. He worked as a war correspondent for RTVE and was a war correspondent for 21 years. His first novel, El húsar, set in the Napoleonic Wars, was released in 1986. He is well known outside Spain for his "Alatriste" series of novels. He is now a member of the Royal Spanish Academy, a position he has held since 12 June 2003.

Writing

Pérez-Reverte's novels are usually centered on one strongly defined character, and his plots move along swiftly, often featuring a narrator who is part of the story but apart from it. Most of his novels take place in Spain or around the Mediterranean, and often draw on numerous references to Spanish history, colonial past, art and culture, ancient treasures and the sea. The novels frequently deal with some of the major issues of modern Spain such as drug trafficking or the relationship of religion and politics.
Often, Pérez-Reverte's novels have two plots running in parallel with very little connection between them except for shared characters. For example, in The Club Dumas, the protagonist is searching the world for a lost book and keeps meeting people who parallel figures from Dumas novels; the movie made from it, The Ninth Gate, did not feature the Dumas connection with no loss of narrative momentum. In The Flanders Panel, a contemporary serial killer is juxtaposed with the mystery of a 500-year-old assassination.
In his often polemical newspaper columns and the main characters of his novels, Pérez-Reverte often displays pessimism about human behaviour, shaped by his wartime experiences in places like El Salvador, Croatia or Bosnia and his research for crime shows.
Throughout his career, and especially in its latter half, he has been notorious for cultivating his now trademark maverick, non-partisan and at times abrasive persona. This has occasionally been a source of conflict with other journalists and writers. He originally refused to have his novels translated from the original Spanish to any language other than French. However, English translations were eventually made available for some of his works, and most of his work is also available in Portuguese and Polish.
Pérez-Reverte was elected to seat T of the Real Academia Española on 23 January 2003 and took up his seat on 12 June the same year.

Awards and recognition

Pérez-Reverte started his journalistic career writing for the now-defunct newspaper Pueblo and then for Televisión Española, often as a war correspondent. Becoming weary of the internal affairs at TVE, he resigned as a journalist and decided to work full-time as a writer.
His teenage daughter Carlota was billed as a co-author of his first Alatriste novel. He lives between La Navata and his native Cartagena, from where he enjoys sailing solo in the Mediterranean. He is a friend of Javier Marías, who presented Pérez-Reverte with the title of Duke of Corso of the Kingdom of Redonda micro nation.
His nephew Arturo Juan Pérez-Reverte is a professional footballer playing for FC Cartagena.

Controversies

Mexican novelist Verónica Murguía accused Arturo Pérez-Reverte of plagiarizing her work. On 10 November 1997 Murguía published a short story, titled "Historia de Sami", in the magazine El laberinto urbano. Months later, in March 1998, Pérez-Reverte published a story in El Semanal, with the title "Un chucho mejicano", bearing close similarities in narration, chronology, phrases, and in the anecdote. Pérez-Reverte's story was recently republished in a re-compilation for the text "Perros e hijos de perra", and it was then that Murguía noticed the plagiarism. Murguía would not proceed with a legal case but asked for an apology and the removal of the story from his text. Meanwhile, Pérez-Reverte apologized and noted that the story he published he wrote exactly as it was told to him by writer Sealtiel Alatriste.
Pérez-Reverte's script for the film Gitano in the late 1990s also brought a case of plagiarism against the author. In May 2011 the Audiencia Provincial of Madrid ordered Pérez-Reverte and Manuel Palacios, director and co-writer of Gitano, to pay 80,000 euros to filmmaker Antonio González-Vigil, who had sued them for alleged plagiarism of the film's script, a decision Pérez-Reverte described as "a clear ambush" and a "clear manoeuvre to extort money." The ruling contradicted two previous criminal rulings and one from a merchant judiciary which had supported Pérez-Reverte and Palacios. In July 2013 the Audiencia Provincial of Madrid ordered Pérez-Reverte to pay 200,000 euros to González-Vigil for plagiarism.

Captain Alatriste novels