David Breeden

Here's a book we've all read before: old war vets get together and reminisce about the horrors they saw; they get drunk; they seek solace in the arms of women.

Here's a book you haven't read before: these guys convene in a worthless Texas desert town on the Mexican border and try to screw Uncle Sam out of some G.I. Bill money by starting an art school in a bar. And the funny part is, some of them are serious about art.

Breeden takes a familiar idea and puts his own sardonic twist on it. Like the disillusioned teen in his book Another Number, or like the goatee-stroking poet that he is in real life, the characters in Artistas approach life with a poetic cynicism that somehow comes across as nostalgic and hopeful. If Dorothy Parker were a grisly old WWII vet in the south Texas desert...

Watch out for the hateful, domineering landlord who owns the town, though, or the reluctantly violent sheriff in his pocket. And then there's Eddie, the youngest and most volatile of the vets, who mouths the words as he reads comic books and practices twirling his pistol out behind the bar, practicing for a gunfight.

The unifying metaphor in the book is a painting, a new spin on the Lord's Supper that seems at first tongue-in-cheek, even sacrilegious. But when you get to know these characters and their struggle with their post-war world, you'll see a different meaning in the painting, and you will come away as they do: no better off but, thank God (or Art), hopeful at last.… (más)