The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse

I had just finished reading Forever Amber by Kathleen Winsor and went looking for another novel to read. Years ago, I had read The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse by Vicente Blasco Ibáñez, and was so impressed, I went back to Project Gutenberg to download more ebooks of Blasco Ibáñez's work. I had put the downloaded mobi files into my computer with the intention of reading them right away. Being a bit of a procrastinator, I neglected the file.

I went back to the neglected file the first week of this year and put Blasco Ibáñez' The Cabin (La barraca) in my Kindle, with a few of his novels going into the queue.

After reading The Cabin (La barraca) and The Torrent (Entre Naranjos).I went on to reread The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse.

First published in 1916, the story revolves around an Argentinian land-owner (millionaire Julio Madariaga) and his two sons-in-law - one a Frenchman (Marcelo Desnoyers), the other German (Karl Hartrott).

Following the death of Madariaga, the two wealthy families move to Europe -Desnoyers to Paris, Hartrott to Germany.

As the two countries go to war, the two families take sides with their new countries.

Blasco Ibáñez' description of German atrocities committed during World War I was mind opening. I had not realized that the German atrocities in WWI were nearly as bad as those committed in the Second World War. No Holocaust, of course, but still astonishing when compared to previous wars in Europe.

The 1918 English translation by Charlotte Brewster Jordan became the best-selling novel in the U.S in 1919. Publishers Weekly hailed it as "a superbly human story told by a genius", a review with which I heartily agree; it is most definitely one of the greatest novels written in the 20th Century.

The novel can be found in a number of formats at Project Gutenberg.