Victus

October 13, 2014
Spanish writer Piñol's odd, hyper-reseached historical novel offers a play-by-play of Catalonia's 1714 annexation by Spain that hardly skips a battle or neglects to namecheck a general in its sprawling account of the War of Spanish Succession. Our guide is the ancient, Catalan-born strategist Marti Zuvi, who dictates (to his hapless nurse) the story of how, as a youth, he studies engineeringâthe science of ramparts and siegesâat the famous Castle Bazoches, in French Burgany, a favorite of the learned Marquis de Vauban. But it is on the field, at the decisive Battle of Almansa, that Zuvi gains his real education. There he meets James Fitz-James, the Duke of Berwick (or, as Zuvi calls him, "Jimmy"), the general who will one day take Barcelona. But before then, Zuvi will find acceptance among misfits within the besieged city gates, fight among both Bourbons and rebel mercenaries, and concoct an astonishing strategy that will take all his training in warfare to survive. It's hard to imagine another work of fiction could be as immersed in its period as this; the novel comes with a timeline, a long list of historically-based characters, and diagrams of the various fortresses and townships that punctuate the uncompromised battle scenes. In fact, Piñol has written less of a novel than a rollicking guided history, meaning that his book will be beloved by history buffs and medievalistsâbut anyone expecting deep pathos, lively plot twists or even particularly stylish prose is setting themselves up for dissapointment.

August 15, 2014
Imagining himself into the mind of a military engineer, Pinol (Pandora in the Congo, 2009, etc.) draws an epic tale from the 1714 Siege of Barcelona. Marti Zuviria, a Barcelona merchant's rambunctious son, is expelled from a French school and relegated to the tutelage of Sebastien Vauban, pre-eminent military engineer, to whom "battle was a rational sphere." After a rollicking, Tom Jones opening-Marti enjoys haystack romps with Vauban's daughter Jeanne-Pinol offers an as-told-to bloody chronicle of Bourbons and Castilians warring against Catalonians. France wants puppet Phillip V as king of a united Spain; opposing allies want Austria's Charles III on that throne. Fate places Marti at one of the "superb moments when life positions us in just the right place where morality and necessity converge," a perfect window for this minor historical figure to become Pinol's jaundiced observer of The War of Two Crowns. Machiavellian maneuvering aside, other real-life personages engrave the novel: "Voltaire, that insufferable dandy;" Don Antonio de Villarroel Pelaez, "a son of Castile, embodying all that was good about that harsh land, sacrificing himself for Barcelona"; and James Fitz-James Berwick, King James' bastard, French marshal, boyish, buoyant, brilliant. Quixote-like, Marti seeks le Mystere, the mystical element at the legendary heart of military engineering, yet he's constantly confronted by his blood-enemy, Verboom, "the Antwerp butcher." Add Nan, a dwarf who wears a funnel for a cap, and Afan, a wily homeless boy, plus a love story between Marti and Amelis, a beautiful prostitute. Marti, too late realizing le Mystere is but "[t]ruths whose only reward is lucidity itself," lives on, burdened by choices made amid carnage, telling his transcriber, "let my treachery drain onto the pages." With extraordinarily gut-wrenching descriptions of bayonets, bloodshed and battle, and the terrors and tribulations inflicted upon besieged Barcelonians, Pinol makes real a tragedy that shaped Spain and Europe.

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