Blood and Sand

“One of the secrets of the immense power exercised by the novels of Vicente Blasco Ibá?ez is that they are literary projections of his dynamic personality. Not only the style, but the book, is here the man. This is especially true of those of his works in which the thesis element predominates, and in which the famous author of The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse appears as a novelist of ideas-in-action. It is, of course, possible to divide his works into the "manners" or "periods" so dear to the literary cataloguers, and it may thus be indicated that there are such fairly distinct genres as the regional novel, the sociological tale and the psychological study; a convenient classification of this sort would place among the regional novels such masterpieces as La Barraca and Ca?as y Barro,-among the novels of purpose such powerful writings as La Catedral, La Bodega and Sangre y Arena,-among the psychological studies the introspective La Maja Desnuda.”