In current Spanish literature we can find few writers who practice the versatility of Leon Arsenal. According to the author's own evolution, it seems to be more a matter of that search for new challenges on which to display the simple taste and great talent of writing, of telling things because it comes from within.
And the truth is that, insisting on being a writer, and getting it, marks a lot the appreciation for any new story, it is limited to the genre that is.
In the nineties León Arsenal cultivated that wonderful trend of the fantastic story for fanzines and magazines of some greater entity where every good writer should be tanned, although it is increasingly difficult to find them (I always imagine at this moment to Stephen King sending his first stories to magazines here and there. Romantic that is one).
With the entry into the new millennium, León was encouraged by the historical novel, and by the thriller, without ever forgetting those origins of the fantastic ...
And this is how we finally find the total writer capable of presenting a novel set in ancient Egypt and then picking up a fantastic novel or bewildered by his latest thriller.
Without a doubt one of those writers necessary to enjoy the eclectic. Because…, the great advantage of the process is fusion, the capacity for a magical literary synthesis that can offer everything… And that's what the good ode León Arsenal is about.
Top 3 recommended novels by León Arsenal
Black flag
One of the last novels of León Arsenal. With the nineteenth-century maritime setting of the year 1837 in which the plot takes place, we travel the Spanish Levant in the Bien Parecida ship.
The First Carlist War acquires an odyssey point seen from the perspective of Juan Miralles, who captains the crew of his ship with a firm hand, knowing in his own flesh the insurrectionary character that every sailor can awaken to any trace of doubt in command. .
Decant on the side of the Liberals, Juan Miralles' mission is to protect maritime traffic and attack smugglers who supplied arms to the wrong faction.
Until Lieutenant Jerónimo González arrives on his ship, with whom he must be in charge of rescuing some well-known works of art whose final destination is unknown. And the search leads them on a fast-paced adventure in the waters of the Mediterranean.
The mouth of the Nile
Some of the greatest expeditions in the history of mankind did not find anyone who could attest to what happened. Something like this is what happened with the advance of Roman soldiers who went in search of the sources of the Nile in the year 60.
For Rome it was quite an enigma how that mighty and exuberant river ended up sinking into the Mediterranean after crossing endless deserts ... And curiosity caused the trip. It is known for sure that this was the case. Nero sent for news from deep Africa, wherever the Nile was born, but he got little more than silence in response.
What León Arsenal asks us is what could have happened in the meeting of centuries of praetorians and legionaries with the blacks who inhabited that African land of the ancient city of Meroe where the Nile was born. Almost two thousand years later the white man was able to tell how he was born the Nile.
And yet that same white man had already been there, God knows what kind of luck, the fate of destiny that only a brilliant narrator like León Arsenal knows how to narrate.
Last Rome
To delve into the more than six hundred pages of this novel by León Arsenal is to enjoy an overwhelming intrahistory that ends up overflowing the narration of the objective events of that year 576 in which the fall of Rome was unleashed.
Psychological profiles of characters who still dreamed of maintaining the old glory of the empire. atrocious, fratricidal struggles for a power that was lost like sand in the hands. Greed and vices as a condemnation for the greatest of the Empires that ever existed.
And among all this the character of Basilisk, the last bastion for the integrity of the empire. Touches of fantasy that combine perfectly with the story, characters from northern Europe such as Claudia Hafhwyfar that provide a point of fantastic epic and a national claim of the first magnitude: the Gothic king Leovigildo who, back in 576, was trying to rebuild the entire peninsula Iberian under his same reign.
Wars are served and those who are to die will greet fate with the assurance that they did everything possible to save their empire.
