Synopses & Reviews
From one of Spain's most celebrated writers, an extraordinary, inspired book-at once fiction, history, and memoir-that draws on the Sephardic diaspora, the Holocaust, and Stalin's purges to tell a twentieth-century story.
Shifting seamlessly from the past to the present and following the routes of escape across countries and continents, Muñoz Molina evokes people real and imagined who come together in a richly allusive pattern-from Eugenia Ginsburg to Grete Buber-Neumann, the one on a train to the gulag, the other to a Nazi concentration camp; from a shoemaker and a nun who become lovers in a small town in Spain to Primo Levi bound for Auschwitz. And others-some well known, others unknown-all voices of separation, nostalgia, love, and endless waiting.
Written with clarity of vision and passion, in a style both lyrical and accessible, Sepharad makes the experience our own.
A brilliant achievement.
Review
"A War and Peace for the Spanish Civil War, this classically sweeping novel from Molina (A Manuscript of Ashes) follows a large cast of characters, intermingling real and fictional figures, through times of both peaceful routine and grotesque violence." - Publishers Weekly
Review
"…a large rough-cut gem of a story that lingers in ones mind. [Molina] appears to be finally getting the international attention he deserves.” - Booklist, Starred Review
"A War and Peace for the Spanish Civil War, this classically sweeping novel from Molina (A Manuscript of Ashes) follows a large cast of characters, intermingling real and fictional figures, through times of both peaceful routine and grotesque violence." - Publishers Weekly
"Molina has written a book of epic proportions...the translated language is beautiful, and the story's complexity highlights human foibles with a freshness that makes for classic literature." - RT Book Reviews
Review
"Spellbinding…What distinguishes
In the Night of Time—what makes it eye-openingly new—is its meticulous reconstruction of Spain in 1936, its attention to detail, its fusion of history and imagination, its tension between love’s surrender and war’s stiff resolve. Let me put it this way: Antonio Muñoz Molina’s novel is one of the most eloquent monuments to the Spanish Civil War ever to be raised in fiction." —Marie Arana,
Washington Post "Labyrinthine and spellbinding…one of the most eloquent monuments to the Spanish Civil War ever to be raised in fiction." --The Washington Post, Best Fiction Books of 2014"A vast, architectural novel." —NPR.org"Sweeping, magisterial...An astonishingly vivid narrative that unfolds with hypnotic intensity by means of the constant interweaving of time and memory...In the Night of Time is Tolstoyan in its scale, emotional intensity and intellectual honesty." —The Economist
"What is remarkable about the book, despite the emphasis on the private and the shadowy, is how much Muñoz Molina manages to say about the world itself and how hypnotic his narrative becomes as he slows down time...He can have his protagonist contemplate his own past in slow and searching tones; he can have him consider his lover's body with mesmeric grace; he can have him ponder his need to escape with urgency; he can have him consider architecture with originality...Muñoz Molina, in all his fiction, has a sense of the past as a living force, darting, shifting, haunting, impossible to pin down...In In the Night of Time he brings this perception further, allowing the most private inner moments to have greater importance than the war outside, and he approaches character with even greater tenderness, allowing for every type of weakness." —Colm Toibin, New York Review of Books"An epic…Molina’s cogent examination of war on a scale both large and small reaffirms his place as a giant of Europe’s literary scene, well-worth being discovered by American readers." —The Daily Beast"A story of love, violence, and politics…[In the Night of Time] echoes Molina’s earlier works, including the much-praised A Manuscript of Ashes." —The New Yorker"Epic…In the Night of Time gives its subject the space it deserves and renders it vibrantly with intoxicating prose." —Entertainment Weekly
"A fascinating read." —Typographical Era"A sweeping, mesmerizing tale that weaves seamlessly between Spain and America, present and past, personal and political." —Bustle.com"Superb…A simple love story at one level, a broad portrait of a nation in flames at another, and a masterwork through and through." —Kirkus (starred review)"A War and Peace for the Spanish Civil War, this classically sweeping novel from Molina (A Manuscript of Ashes) follows a large cast of characters, intermingling real and fictional figures, through times of both peaceful routine and grotesque violence." —Publishers Weekly"A large rough-cut gem of a story that lingers in one’s mind. [Molina] appears to be finally getting the international attention he deserves." —Booklist (starred review)“Antonio Munoz Molina's In The Night of Time is a sweeping love story enveloped by the horrors of the Spanish Civil War…In this monumental book, Molina has described with brutal honesty the atrocities committed on both sides of the war.” – Charleston Post and Courier
Review
PRAISE FOR SEPHARAD
"A magnificent novel about the iniquity and horror of fanaticism, and especially the human being's indestructible spirit."-Mario Vargas Llosa
"If Balzac wrote The Human Comedy, Muñoz Molina has written the adventure of exile, solitude, and memory."-Arturo Pérez-Reverte
Review
"One might argue against such a literary appropriation of the Holocaust, yet Munoz Molina's urgent desire to bear witness to it, even though at a remove, and his very sensitive ability to evoke the humiliations of its victims makes Sepharad an amazing book. The Margaret Sayers Peden translation is excellent. Read it."
Review
"A brilliant, fearful, and unforgettable book."
Review
"Now that American readers have the opportunity to encounter Molina, we may want to adopt him as our own...Together his sketches comprise a harrowing sketch of private life in the 20th century."
Review
"Obsessive in its detail, inspiring in its scope and monumental in its ambitions...smart and insightful...intellectually demanding..."
Review
"Munoz Molina writes the novels of the people he's met and imagined, gleaning from the names he encounters stories that vibrate beneath the burden of history, that lift with the breath of human life."
Review
"Moving and often astonishing."
Review
"Elegiacally beautiful...Calling on such inspiring figures as Franz Kafka and Primo Levi for guidance. Munoz Molina creates astute, deeply felt, and exquisitely expressive testimony to love, suffering, and the astonishing fecundity of human consciousness."
Review
"Will intrigue and enthrall determined readers willing to let this thoughtful writer lead them through history into the hearts of exiles at home and abroad."
Review
"This is the land of the marked, the fated, the terminally ill, and we should be grateful that Munoz Molina is our brave guide in this world."
Review
"Beautifully constructed and very rich."
Review
"This book is no boneless 'meditation'; it has all the onward rush and effortfulness of an epic, and it's studded with the terrible stories you hear from acquaintances in 'the insomniac world of travelers.'"
Review
PRAISE FOR
SEPHARAD "Shame and guilt, homelands and exile, ceaseless wanderings and bitter alienations both internal and external, metaphorical and real, are persistent motifs of Muñoz Molinas remarkable novelone that turns out to be about a territory far vaster than 'Sepharad' itself: Europe, perhaps even the world . . . [A] masterpiece."Daniel Mendelsohn,
The New York Review of Books"A magnificent novel about the iniquity and horror of fanaticism, and especially the human being's indestructible spirit."Mario Vargas Llosa
Review
"This is a brilliant novel by an important writer unafraid of ideas, emotions and genuine beauty. 'A Manuscript of Ashes' could be pleasurably read out of appreciation for any one of those qualities-- or, perhaps, for the intricately plotted mystery that bears the novel's characters along like travelers on a dark, treacherous river."
Review
"[R]apturously Gothic...The book is written in incantatory run-on sentences, intoxicated with sensual details...The past, Mr. Munoz Molina implies, is never as dead as we think, and the stories it tells us are never free of hidden agendas."
Review
"In 2003, the acclaimed Spanish writer and journalist Antonio Munoz Molina took the English-speaking world by storm with the translation of his work 'Sepharad.' Now Anglophone readers will get to revel anew in Munoz Molina's sensual prose and fluid plotlines with the translation of his first novel."
Review
"Antonio Munoz Molina's latest beautifully wrought novel, 'A Manuscript of Ashes', is set in Franco-era Spain and tells the story of a young university student, Minaya, who retreats to his uncle Manuel's mansion in the countryside to write a thesis on a neglected poet the old man once knew. As the plot progresses, Minaya uncovers a startling truth about the relationship between the men, and the story darkens into a meta-mystery. Molina writes in big, fat paragraphs and the kind of lush sentences that can bear the scrutiny usually reserved for poems."
Review
"[A]compulsively re-readable novel (which has been splendidly translated by Edith Grossman)...The insistence on the primacy of the invisible reckoning, as opposed to the outwardly visible action, gives...this novel an unsinkable power."
Review
"Intense, kaleidoscopic....the narrative speeds along on the strength of the spell it weaves."
Review
"[I]ts enigmatic melancholy offers rewards."
Review
"Already a contemporary classic, this work...is an enigmatic gem in the very best metafiction tradition."
Synopsis
From the author of Sepharad comes an internationally best-selling novel set against the tumultuous events that led to the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War.
Synopsis
October 1936. Spanish architect Ignacio Abel arrives at Penn Station, the final stop on his journey from war-torn Madrid, where he has left behind his wife and children, abandoning them to uncertainty. Crossing the fragile borders of Europe, he reflects on months of fratricidal conflict in his embattled country, his own transformation from a bricklayers son to a respected bourgeois husband and professional, and the all-consuming love affair with an American woman that forever alters his life.
Winner of the 2012 Prix Méditerranée Étranger and hailed as a masterpiece, In the Night of Time is a sweeping, grand novel and an indelible portrait of a shattered society, written by one of Spains most important contemporary novelists.
Synopsis
Its the late sixties, the last dark years of Francos dictatorship: Minaya, a university student in Madrid, is caught up in the student protests and the police are after him. He moves to his uncle Manuels country estate in the small town of Mágina to write his thesis on an old friend of Manuels, an obscure republican poet named Jacinto Solana.
The country house is full of traces of the poetnotes, photographs, journalsand Minaya soon discovers that, thirty years earlier, during the Spanish Civil War, both his uncle and Solana were in love with the same woman, the beautiful, unsettling Mariana. Engaged to Manuel, she was shot in the attic of the house on her wedding night. With the aid of Inés, a maid, Minaya begins to search for Solanas lost masterpiece, a novel called Beatus Ille. Looking for a book, he unravels a crime.
About the Author
ANTONIO MUÑOZ MOLINA is the author of more than a dozen novels, among them Sepharad, A Manuscript of Ashes, and In Her Absence. He has also been awarded the Jerusalem Prize and the Príncipe de Asturias Prize, among many others. He lives in Madrid and New York City. EDITH GROSSMAN is the acclaimed translator of, among others, Cervantes, Gabriel García Márquez, and Mario Vargas Llosa. In 2006 she was awarded the PEN/Ralph Manheim Medal for Translation.
Table of Contents
Sacristan
Copenhagen
Those Who Wait
Silencing Everything
Valdemún
Oh You, Who Knew So Well
Münzenberg
Olympia
Berghof
Cerbère
Wherever The Man Goes
Scheherazade
America
You Are...
Narva
Tell Me Your Name
Sepharad