''El húsar'' () is a 1986 novel by the Spanish writer

Arturo Pérez-Reverte Arturo Pérez-Reverte Gutiérrez (born 25 November 1951) is a Spanish novelist and journalist. He worked as a war correspondent for RTVE for 21 years (1973–1994). His first novel, '' El húsar'', set in the Napoleonic Wars, was published in ...

. It is set during the

Napoleonic Wars {{Infobox military conflict , conflict = Napoleonic Wars , partof = the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars , image = Napoleonic Wars (revision).jpg , caption = Left to right, top to bottom:Battl ...

and follows Frederic Glüntz, a

hussar A hussar, ; ; ; ; . was a member of a class of light cavalry, originally from the Kingdom of Hungary during the 15th and 16th centuries. The title and distinctive dress of these horsemen were subsequently widely adopted by light cavalry ...

who starts as an idealistic young recruit but becomes increasingly disillusioned by battle experience. The book was Pérez-Reverte's debut as a novelist. Analyzing the book in 2007, Anne L. Walsh compared it to Pérez-Reverte's other war novels ' (1994) and ' (2004), and wrote that they treat the past as fundamentally the same as the present. She wrote that Glüntz, at the end of ''El húsar'', "has moved from the desire for mythical heroism to the disillusioned indifference of an old soldier, and within that indifference lies the true level of bravey in the face of inevitable defeat".

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Husar 1986 Spanish novels Novels by Arturo Pérez-Reverte Novels set during the Napoleonic Wars 1986 debut novels Spanish historical novels