Synopses & Reviews
Winner of the 2020 Medici Prize for Foreign Novel
From the award-winning author of the Man Booker Prize finalist Like a Fading Shadow, Antonio Muñoz Molina presents a flâneur-novel tracing the path of a nameless wanderer as he walks the length of Manhattan, and his mind.
De Quincey, Baudelaire, Poe, Joyce, Benjamin, Melville, Lorca, Whitman... walkers and city dwellers all, collagists and chroniclers, picking the detritus of their eras off the filthy streets and assembling it into something new, shocking, and beautiful. In To Walk Alone in the Crowd, Antonio Muñoz Molina emulates these classic inspirations, following their peregrinations and telling their stories in a book that is part memoir, part novel, part chronicle of urban wandering.
A skilled collagist himself, Munoz Molina here assembles overheard conversations, subway ads, commercials blazing away on public screens, snatches from books hurriedly packed into bags or shoved under one's arm, mundane anxieties, and the occasional true flash of insight — struggling to announce itself amid this barrage of data — into a poem of contemporary life: an invitation to let oneself be carried along by the sheer energy of the digital metropolis.
A denunciation of the harsh noise of capitalism, of the conversion of everything into either merchandise or garbage (or both), To Walk Alone in the Crowd is also a celebration of the beauty and variety of our world, of the ecological and aesthetic gaze that can, even now, recycle waste into art, and provide an opportunity for rebirth.
Review
"An eclectic and singular novel that flows naturally between fiction, personal narrative, and literary essay." El Correo Gallego
Review
"The solitary writer's journeys and observations culminate in his discovery of solace in loving his wife, and his passion makes the narrative deeply rewarding. The result is a treasure trove." Publishers Weekly (starred review)
Review
"[To Walk Alone in the Crowd] allows us to walk through cities even if only in dreams during these times of confinement." Marie Darrieussecq, author of Being Here Is Everything: The Life of Paula Modersohn-Becker
Review
"[Muñoz Molina] stumbles upon truths inaccessible to historians and other novelists alike." BOMB
About the Author
Antonio Muñoz Molina is the author of more than a dozen novels, including In the Night of Time, Sepharad, and Like a Fading Shadow. He is the recipient of numerous prizes and awards, including Spain’s National Narrative Prize, the Planeta Prize, and the Príncipe de Asturias Prize. He has been a full member of the Royal Spanish Academy since 1995. He lives in Madrid and New York City.
Guillermo Bleichmar was born in Argentina and grew up in Buenos Aires and Mexico City. He holds a BA in English Literature from Columbia and a PhD in Comparative Literature from Harvard University. He teaches liberal arts at St. John's College in Santa Fe, New Mexico.
Jeremy Garber on PowellsBooks.Blog
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