Antonio Muñoz Molina

This is an unusual book in form: not only is it a novel that mixes non-fiction with fiction (something that a lot of books I've read recently do), but it also muddies the distinction between the novel and short fiction, in that its seventeen chapters can all be read as individual stories, testimonies or essays, and it is only when you read them all together that you start to see that there is also an underlying deep structure that links them together into a single work. And as if that wasn't show more enough, Muñoz Molina uses the disconcerting narrative trick of jumping unpredictably backwards and forwards within each chapter between a third person omniscient narrator, the first-person view of the "writer" character, the first-person view of someone who is telling him a story, and sometimes a second-person view of the person who is telling that person a story. But it all seems to work very well, once you get inside the book.

The many different stories Muñoz Molina brings together the book all dig into different aspects of exile or alienation - Spanish and German communists in Russia during the second world war, the narrator and his compatriots who are economic migrants from southern Spain to Madrid, Jews who found themselves suddenly declared undesirable aliens in their own countries under the Nazis, Kafka going secretly to the frontier to meet his lover Milena Jesenska, and Milena's death in the Ravensbrück concentration camp 25 years later. And much more, all tied in together by the underlying image of the expulsion of the Jews from Spain in 1492.

The subject-matter is often difficult and painful, but it's a pleasure to follow the rhythms of Muñoz Molina's writing and the understated way he navigates through it all without hitting us over the head with unnecessary explanations. But be warned: it's a book that comes with a heavy reading list you will almost certainly want to follow up yourself. Quite apart from the cunning way he ends the book with a huge advertisement for the museum of the Hispanic Society of America in New York (but it turns out that they are currently closed for renovations, so check before booking your flight...). show less

In the dour Madrid of the 1950s, students Adriana and Gabriel become close friends and lovers. But when Gabriel goes off to California in 1967 to embark on a demanding new career in international finance, they lose touch and both marry other people. It’s not until forty-seven years later that they meet again, in the same room where they said goodbye.

Muñoz Molina turns this reunion of old lovers into the literary equivalent of a Bach cello suite, full of virtuoso formal structures (not show more least an opening sentence that goes on for over seventy pages), circling repetitions and complicated counterpoint. Gabriel, Adriana and the hapless narrator, Professor Máiquez, all have their own conflicting versions of what has gone on in the relationship over those forty-seven years. Through them we dig into the way a “lost love” can turn into an exercise in selfishness and self-indulgence, but also into the subtle ways our lives can be marked by history and geography, specifically by the nature of Spain during and after the Franco era and by the contrast between Europe and North America.

Although it’s a surprisingly short book, this feels like something intended as a major piece of literature. Thomas Bernhard’s name is dropped noisily in the jacket blurb, but it also feels a little bit as though Muñoz Molina is bagsying the place left vacant by Javier Marías. Irrespective of that, it is an enjoyable read and an intriguing twist on an old theme. show less

It's the hot summer of 1969, and our 12-year-old narrator is following the progress of the Apollo XI moon mission from his home in the small town of Mágina in southern Spain (this fictional version of the author's birthplace, Úbeda, appears in several of his other books). He puts himself imaginatively into the minds of the astronauts — their isolation and the unknown dangers they face reflect in unexpected ways on his situation as an adolescent. But the high-tech world of spaceflight show more also seems bizarrely out of step with the backward semi-rural life he knows, where the family still gets its water in buckets from the well and uses a mule and a donkey for transport.

Big changes are happening for the narrator. He feels like a stranger in his own body, struggling to cope with the mental and physical changes of adolescence (and the constant masturbation-guilt). But he's also the first person in his family of peasants and market-gardeners to go to secondary school, and no-one at home can quite make sense of his passion for books; he no longer sees anything of his primary-school friends, who are all now doing apprenticeships or working in the fields, but at the Salesian school he's with bourgeois boys who can't relate to his peasant background and the way he has to work in the holidays.

The world in 1969 is in an exciting state of flux too: spaceflight above all, but there are also things like television, running water, tourists in short skirts and sunglasses, gas cookers, telephones, Faye Dunaway in Bonnie and Clyde, refrigerators, aeroplanes towing advertisements for products no-one he knows would have any idea what to do with... His reading is racing ahead of his Catholic teachers, too: he is aware of the narrow-mindedness of the maths-teaching headmaster, who likes to use Darwin, Nietzsche and Galileo as examples of thinkers punished by God for their presumptuousness, and is beginning to see through the charismatic young Father Peter — keen on the dignity of physical labour, although he's never actually done any — who sees the narrator as vocation material and keeps trying to persuade him to read Teilhard de Chardin.

Underlying all this, there's another, largely suppressed layer, with the people of Mágina still working through the consequences of things that happened thirty years ago in the Civil War. A prosperous neighbour is dying of cancer, which the narrator's grandfather (who had been a policeman under the Republic) sees as a very inadequate punishment for the way he cheated them of their savings at the end of the war; another neighbour is found hanged in his house — it's treated officially as suicide, but everyone in the street thinks it must have been delayed revenge.

Obviously, either the young Muñoz Molina was very precocious, or his adult self has been guilty of a little time-compression for dramatic purposes, but it's easy to suspend disbelief and engage with his vivid descriptions of the world of his childhood. A lot of it felt very like what I remember from that time, the excitement of all those acronym-filled technical diagrams of the Saturn V and the Apollo capsule to cut out and keep from magazines, the conviction that the world would never be the same as it was for our parents (different war, same principle), the realisation that our dim teachers had been fobbing us off with religious nonsense, the knowledge that space was quite different and actually much more interesting in reality than it was in H.G. Wells and Jules Verne, and so on. All those things you see so clearly in your early teens, which have a way of becoming nuanced and difficult later on... show less

We've all been there: you're stuck in an airport somewhere for a few hours, you've got a pile of books and your laptop and you're looking forward to enjoying a bit of peace and quiet, and then someone (a stranger, an acquaintance you normally avoid...) pops up and engages you in conversation, and you know you aren't going to be able to get rid of them until your flight leaves and/or they've told you the story of their lives. (Mutatis mutandis for the old version of this social nightmare with show more wedding guests and albatrosses.)

In the case of Muñoz's narrator, a Spanish academic on his way to a Borges conference in Buenos Aires from the US college where he teaches, the culprit is a businessman who identifies him as a compatriot from the copy of El Pais sticking out of his pocket. "I will never return to Buenos Aires," he tells the narrator, and proceeds to explain why. The story - of a transient fling with a woman he met in a crumbling grand hotel there - isn't a particularly long or complicated one, but both the businessman and the narrator know how to stretch out the tension with cunningly placed digressions and reflections on airports, America versus Europe, the way narrative works, the hotel trade, and so on. And of course the narrator eventually gets to Buenos Aires and discovers something that puts the whole story he was told into a quite different, and very Borgesian light.

Apart from a lot of allusions to Borges (some of which I was able to spot), there's also a Treasure Island theme running through the book, introduced by Borges's sonnet "Blind Pew", and there's also a satirical subplot of campus intrigue. We've been fearing the worst ever since we discovered that the narrator's institution is Humbert College, in Humbert Pa., where he lives on Humbert Lane and attends colloquia in Humbert Hall, and we know he's in trouble when he meets his nemesis, the redoubtable Professor Ann Gadea Simpson Mariátegui, the Terminator of New Lesbian Criticism, "who displays the surnames of her ex-husbands like a head-hunter's trophies"...

A clever, entertaining little book that sneaks in a very RLS-ish plot under a smokescreen of postmodernism. show less