Reverte quits journalism after 33 years of weekly columns

Reverte ends his weekly column: 33 years of craft and controversy

Arturo Pérez-Reverte has announced that he is stepping away from his weekly appointment with newspaper readers. The writer is thus closing a 33-year chapter in Sunday supplements, a period he himself chose to stress in a farewell repeated ad nauseam: "33 years". The news, which circulated as a rumour before being confirmed, comes with the author admitting he is now "far too old" to keep up the discipline of a column.

The reaction among his regular readers is far from unanimous. Some mourn the loss of one of the last voices with a vocabulary of its own and a certain professional depth in Spanish opinion writing. Others point out that the farewell comes late: the column had been showing signs of exhaustion for some time. The formula had become predictable: every other week, a topic from Spain's history that ended up as a book, then a turn towards European history, and barely a couple of free-form articles a month. Lately, much of what he signed had an autobiographical tinge, more a review of his own exploits than an analysis of current affairs.

What does not seem to have a clear successor is that gap in the paper. The question is not only who will fill the Sunday page, but who can sustain a column for three decades without losing their spark. Reverte's story is also that of a model of column-writing that is dying out: the writer who steps into the arena every week, with his phobias and his fixations, and who still gets read. That some celebrated his exit as a relief while others saw it as a loss is the best summary of a career that never left anyone indifferent.