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Sefarad
En estas páginas Primo Levi, Franz Kafka, Evgenia Ginzburg, Milena Jesenska, Dolores Ibárruri o Walter Benjamin mezclan sus tragedias con las de personajes ficticios. Todos ellos comparten un estigma: un día despiertan convertidos en lo que otros cuentan de ellos, en lo que alguien que no les ha conocido cuenta que le han contado, en lo que alguien que les odia imagina que son. Perseguidos por la infamia y arrojados de su casa y de su país, se ven obligados a abandonar sus vidas.Sefarad, nombre que en la tradición hebrea se da a España, designa aquí todos los exilios posibles. El Holocausto y el nazismo, el Gulag, la guerra civil española, el Imperio austrohúngaro, la Inquisición y la expulsión de los judíos articulan a través de cada capítulo una sinfonía en la que la idea coral es una sola: la intolerancia, la persecución y la irracionalidad que asolan la historia de la humanidad, y que dan lugar al título. Antonio Muñoz Molina nos ofrece una aproximación al mundo de los excluidos a través de este homenaje a la memoria.
608 pages
First published March 7, 2001
164 people are currently reading
1902 people want to read
About the author
Antonio Muñoz Molina
131 books576 followersAntonio Muñoz Molina is a Spanish writer and, since 8 June 1995, a full member of the Royal Spanish Academy. He currently resides in New York City, United States. In 2004-2005 he served as the director of the Instituto Cervantes of New York.
He was born in the town of Úbeda in Jaén province.
He studied art history at the University of Granada and journalism in Madrid. He began writing in the 1980s and his first published book, El Robinsón urbano, a collection of his journalistic work, was published in 1984. His columns have regularly appeared in El País and Die Welt.
His first novel, Beatus ille, appeared in 1986. It features the imaginary city of Mágina — a re-creation of his Andalusian birthplace — which would reappear in some his later works.
In 1987 Muñoz Molina was awarded Spain's National Narrative Prize for El invierno en Lisboa (translated as Winter in Lisbon), a homage to the genres of film noir and jazz music. His El jinete polaco received the Planeta Prize in 1991 and, again, the National Narrative Prize in 1992.
His other novels include Beltenebros (1989), a story of love and political intrigue in post-Civil War Madrid, Los misterios de Madrid (1992), and El dueño del secreto (1994).
Margaret Sayers Peden's English-language translation of Muñoz Molina's novel Sepharad won the PEN/Book-of-the-Month Club Translation Prize in 2004. He won the Jerusalem Prize in 2013.
He is married to Spanish author and journalist, Elvira Lindo.
He was born in the town of Úbeda in Jaén province.
He studied art history at the University of Granada and journalism in Madrid. He began writing in the 1980s and his first published book, El Robinsón urbano, a collection of his journalistic work, was published in 1984. His columns have regularly appeared in El País and Die Welt.
His first novel, Beatus ille, appeared in 1986. It features the imaginary city of Mágina — a re-creation of his Andalusian birthplace — which would reappear in some his later works.
In 1987 Muñoz Molina was awarded Spain's National Narrative Prize for El invierno en Lisboa (translated as Winter in Lisbon), a homage to the genres of film noir and jazz music. His El jinete polaco received the Planeta Prize in 1991 and, again, the National Narrative Prize in 1992.
His other novels include Beltenebros (1989), a story of love and political intrigue in post-Civil War Madrid, Los misterios de Madrid (1992), and El dueño del secreto (1994).
Margaret Sayers Peden's English-language translation of Muñoz Molina's novel Sepharad won the PEN/Book-of-the-Month Club Translation Prize in 2004. He won the Jerusalem Prize in 2013.
He is married to Spanish author and journalist, Elvira Lindo.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 122 reviews
May 30, 2025
So, I fell behind again with my reviews. I wanted to write more about Sepharad because it truly is a remarkable book, albeit too long. Well, I will have to settle for a quick review. I also lost my highlights since the book is no longer available on Everand.
Antonio Muñoz Molina is a celebrated Spanish writer with quite a few books translated in English. In theory, Sepharad is a novel but I see it more as a collection of fictionalized essays. For each chapter we have a different narrator, but the subject is more or less the same. War, genocide, death, suffering, exile, survival. It’s about Stalin, about the Holocaust and about the civil war. It is a metafiction, writers such as Kafka, Levi, Ginzburg are mentioned repeatedly in the book. It is a hard read due to the themes approached. I could only sip it in small doses. The chapter titled ,Those Who Wait, destroyed me for days. It was about people who waited too long to take the decision to run away, to save themselves.
I only give Sepharad 4* because it was a bit too long and it became repetitive after a time. Still, a very good book and an author I plan to explore further.
Antonio Muñoz Molina is a celebrated Spanish writer with quite a few books translated in English. In theory, Sepharad is a novel but I see it more as a collection of fictionalized essays. For each chapter we have a different narrator, but the subject is more or less the same. War, genocide, death, suffering, exile, survival. It’s about Stalin, about the Holocaust and about the civil war. It is a metafiction, writers such as Kafka, Levi, Ginzburg are mentioned repeatedly in the book. It is a hard read due to the themes approached. I could only sip it in small doses. The chapter titled ,Those Who Wait, destroyed me for days. It was about people who waited too long to take the decision to run away, to save themselves.
I only give Sepharad 4* because it was a bit too long and it became repetitive after a time. Still, a very good book and an author I plan to explore further.
July 21, 2024
Sepharad is a biblical name of Iberian Peninsula where the children of Israel were abiding in the captivity… And the novel is the book of exile… The book of nostalgia… And the book of memory…
It is a book of roads… Going from place to place… Roads of wars and captivity…
The years of sanguinary purges… Brutelity of fascism… Bloodshed of the civil war… Ghosts of the past… Agony of pain and sadness… Time erases all…
Revisiting the past sometimes brings joy and sometimes it brings anguish.
It’s true, many of us would like to live in the immutable past of our memories, a past that seems to live on in the taste of some foods and those dates marked in red on the calendars…
It is a book of roads… Going from place to place… Roads of wars and captivity…
The great night of Europe is shot through with long, sinister trains, with convoys of cattle and freight cars with boarded-up windows moving very slowly toward barren, wintry, snow- or mud-covered expanses encircled by barbed wire and guard towers.
The years of sanguinary purges… Brutelity of fascism… Bloodshed of the civil war… Ghosts of the past… Agony of pain and sadness… Time erases all…
Love, suffering, even some of the greatest hells on Earth are erased after one or two generations, and a day comes when there is not one living witness who can remember.
Revisiting the past sometimes brings joy and sometimes it brings anguish.
April 29, 2022
This is a book of reconstructed memories related to Madrid during the Spanish Civil War, WWII, and Stalin’s regime. It is based on eye-witness accounts from the author’s research (letters, oral history, and notable works of literature), but rather than write a non-fiction, the author ties everything together through various fictional narrators. The main characters have ties to Spain and Spanish history.
The narrative is comprised of seventeen loosely connected short stories. It is told in a non-linear fashion, moving forward and backward to different countries and time periods. The novel is structured around journeys on trains, and the stories people have told each other while traveling. Primary themes are memory, displacement, identity, and storytelling.
We encounter literary references to well-known authors such as Franz Kafka, Margarete Buber-Neumann, Evgenia Ginzburg, Jean Améry, Primo Levi, Stephan Koch, Tzvetan Todorov, and others. Their experiences are woven into the stories told on the trains. The overall effect is that of a montage of memories. As one narrator states, the idea is not to invent these stories but “to fit them together like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. Each became a mystery, illuminating the others, creating multiple links that I could break or modify at my whim, patterns in which no image nullified the others or gained precedence or lost its uniqueness within the whole.”
I had never read anything by Antonio Muñoz Molina. What an amazing writer. He creates a vivid sense of place, establishes atmosphere, and strings words together in a pleasing lyrical manner. I read the English translation so due credit goes to the translator, Margaret Sayers Peden. I will definitely be searching for more of his works.
My e-book is filled with highlights. Here are a few of the many memorable passages:
- “THERE’S NO LIMIT TO the surprising stories you can hear if you listen to the novels in people’s lives.”
- “At night we would watch the flickering lights of Tangiers through the ocean fog. I was in Tangiers once, many years ago, in another lifetime. As the doctor squeezes the curve of the shell, he is squeezing the hand of his son two summers before. His wife is pressed to his other side, to protect herself from the west wind off the sea, blowing from the direction of the dark mass of Africa and the lights of Tangiers, a wind smelling of seaweed.”
- “People always want to know how stories end; whether well or badly, they want the resolution to be as neat as the beginning, they want sense and symmetry. But few adventures in life tie up all the loose strings, unless fate steps in, or death, and some stories never develop, they come to nothing or are interrupted just as they are beginning.”
- “YOU ARE NOT AN isolated person and do not have an isolated story, and neither your face nor your profession nor the other circumstances of your past or present life are cast in stone. The past shifts and reforms, and mirrors are unpredictable.”
- “Who could guess the life of this man, seeing him as he crosses the street or stands in the entryway of that anonymous building? A vigorous old man with a sparkle in his small eyes, a little bent, and with very fine white hair, like Spencer Tracy toward the end, or like my paternal grandfather, who was also in a war, but not one he marched off to voluntarily, and it may be that my grandfather never completely understood why they took him or realized the magnitude of the cataclysm his life had been dragged into, a life of which mine, if I stop to think about it, is in part a distant echo.”
-
- “The war was filled with coincidences … with chains of random events that dragged you away or saved you; your life could depend not on your heroism or caution or cleverness but on whether you bent down to tighten a boot one second before a bullet or shard of shrapnel passed through the place where your head would have been, or whether a comrade took your turn in a scouting patrol from which no one came back.”
The narrative is comprised of seventeen loosely connected short stories. It is told in a non-linear fashion, moving forward and backward to different countries and time periods. The novel is structured around journeys on trains, and the stories people have told each other while traveling. Primary themes are memory, displacement, identity, and storytelling.
We encounter literary references to well-known authors such as Franz Kafka, Margarete Buber-Neumann, Evgenia Ginzburg, Jean Améry, Primo Levi, Stephan Koch, Tzvetan Todorov, and others. Their experiences are woven into the stories told on the trains. The overall effect is that of a montage of memories. As one narrator states, the idea is not to invent these stories but “to fit them together like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. Each became a mystery, illuminating the others, creating multiple links that I could break or modify at my whim, patterns in which no image nullified the others or gained precedence or lost its uniqueness within the whole.”
I had never read anything by Antonio Muñoz Molina. What an amazing writer. He creates a vivid sense of place, establishes atmosphere, and strings words together in a pleasing lyrical manner. I read the English translation so due credit goes to the translator, Margaret Sayers Peden. I will definitely be searching for more of his works.
My e-book is filled with highlights. Here are a few of the many memorable passages:
- “THERE’S NO LIMIT TO the surprising stories you can hear if you listen to the novels in people’s lives.”
- “At night we would watch the flickering lights of Tangiers through the ocean fog. I was in Tangiers once, many years ago, in another lifetime. As the doctor squeezes the curve of the shell, he is squeezing the hand of his son two summers before. His wife is pressed to his other side, to protect herself from the west wind off the sea, blowing from the direction of the dark mass of Africa and the lights of Tangiers, a wind smelling of seaweed.”
- “People always want to know how stories end; whether well or badly, they want the resolution to be as neat as the beginning, they want sense and symmetry. But few adventures in life tie up all the loose strings, unless fate steps in, or death, and some stories never develop, they come to nothing or are interrupted just as they are beginning.”
- “YOU ARE NOT AN isolated person and do not have an isolated story, and neither your face nor your profession nor the other circumstances of your past or present life are cast in stone. The past shifts and reforms, and mirrors are unpredictable.”
- “Who could guess the life of this man, seeing him as he crosses the street or stands in the entryway of that anonymous building? A vigorous old man with a sparkle in his small eyes, a little bent, and with very fine white hair, like Spencer Tracy toward the end, or like my paternal grandfather, who was also in a war, but not one he marched off to voluntarily, and it may be that my grandfather never completely understood why they took him or realized the magnitude of the cataclysm his life had been dragged into, a life of which mine, if I stop to think about it, is in part a distant echo.”
-
- “The war was filled with coincidences … with chains of random events that dragged you away or saved you; your life could depend not on your heroism or caution or cleverness but on whether you bent down to tighten a boot one second before a bullet or shard of shrapnel passed through the place where your head would have been, or whether a comrade took your turn in a scouting patrol from which no one came back.”
February 24, 2010
A revelation...lapidary new insight into so many of my own intellectual and emotional obsessions, both an intimate portrait of mourning, the loss of youth, growing up, travel, and the trains taken and untaken, and a history of the 20th century and beyond. Most reminded me of reading Proust.
October 31, 2023
Described as a novel, but is really a collection of seventeen essays and short stories on themes related to flight or exile. Some of Muñoz Molina’s characters are taken from history, others are fictional or perhaps drawn from his own experience. They range from Spanish Republicans persecuted during and after the Civil War to descendants of the Jewish Sephardic diaspora, to those fleeing the horrors of Nazi Germany or Stalinist Russia. Yet others are simply people dislocated somehow from normal life. Characters do reappear across some stories but essentially each one can stand alone.
Muñoz Molina writes compellingly and eloquently, with words flowing in cascades of run-on sentences like a river. It’s not easy reading but I was immediately immersed each time. And I very much admired the way he fluidly changes pronouns to suggest distance – a narrator “I” suddenly becoming a more remote “he” – or is transformed into “you” to accentuate intimacy.
One of my favourites, valdemun, is not about flight from oppression. Rather it’s flight towards - a thirtyish woman returning to her dying aunt who had raised her and her sister after their mother died, and to her family gathered at her aunt’s bedside. Yet “I” in this story is her husband, driving her there and observing her anxiety and grief, but “I” is also the voice of her long-dead mother; the past and present intertwined. I can’t explain why the story had such an intense effect on me, but it did.
In a way, the various stories are like looking into the same house through different windows. But I also found it took me a while – several pages - to “get” what I was looking at each time; that is the problem with short stories and I think I am going to search out a longer novel by this wonderful author.
Muñoz Molina writes compellingly and eloquently, with words flowing in cascades of run-on sentences like a river. It’s not easy reading but I was immediately immersed each time. And I very much admired the way he fluidly changes pronouns to suggest distance – a narrator “I” suddenly becoming a more remote “he” – or is transformed into “you” to accentuate intimacy.
One of my favourites, valdemun, is not about flight from oppression. Rather it’s flight towards - a thirtyish woman returning to her dying aunt who had raised her and her sister after their mother died, and to her family gathered at her aunt’s bedside. Yet “I” in this story is her husband, driving her there and observing her anxiety and grief, but “I” is also the voice of her long-dead mother; the past and present intertwined. I can’t explain why the story had such an intense effect on me, but it did.
In a way, the various stories are like looking into the same house through different windows. But I also found it took me a while – several pages - to “get” what I was looking at each time; that is the problem with short stories and I think I am going to search out a longer novel by this wonderful author.
March 8, 2015
On page 140, the author appears to describe a vision for this book:
"For two or three years I have flirted with the idea of writing a novel, imagined situations and places, like snapshots, or like those posters displayed on large billboards at the entrance to a movie theater. That these stills were never in narrative sequence made them all the more powerful, freed them of the weight and vulgar conventions of a scenario; they were revelations in the present, with no before or after. When I didn't have the money to go inside, I would spend hours looking at the photographs outside the theater, not needing to invent a story to fit them together like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. Each became a mystery, illuminating the others, creating multiple links that I could break or modify at my whim, patterns in which no image nullified the others or gained precedence or lost its uniqueness within the whole."
Here, it is as if Muñoz Molina is describing not only his journey, but mine; or, as if he is describing what living is like for many of us. The journey is our life. From pages 153/154:
"Days before leaving, my life had already been turned by the magnet of my journey, pulled toward the hour of departure, which approached with agonizing slowness. I was still here yet distant, though no one noticed my absence, not from the places I lived and worked, not from the things that were extensions of myself and indicated my existence, my immobilized life, confined to a single city, to a few streets….
"Never was I so obsessed with impossible journeys as then, so distanced from myself and from the tangible and real around me. It wasn't that an important part of me was hidden from others' eyes; my whole self was hidden. The shell that others saw didn't matter at all, it had nothing to do with me. … With literary vanity, I sought refuge in being unknown, hidden, but there was a conformity in me at least as strong as my rebellion, with the difference that the conformity was practical while the rebellion showed only occasionally as a blurry discontent…"
"There were two worlds, one visible and the other invisible, and I adapted tamely to the norms of the first so I could retreat without too much inconvenience into the second."
My thoughts upon completion:
This book didn’t make me want to pick it up between readings. But why should it be the book’s responsibility to make me? It was I who needed this book, and not the other way around. And as I took my time, for weeks, reading it, I was unable to forget that need of mine. I could not find a desire to read anything else between my short sessions with Muñoz Molina’s journey in this novel. And, with each paragraph, each chapter, each page, I was filled up with his poetry of thought and his longing for memory. There was no other way for me to read this book.
His journey is a long one. His memories and reflections, his connections between one train, one place, one tense and another take time. I was surprised each time I picked it up that this book is a light 385 pages, when his travels between the book’s covers are so weighty. The traveling between past and present, between history and personal memoir, between what appears to be fiction and is known to be nonfiction, goes so very deep and so very far. After finally finishing it, I know I am still there, in those pages, almost nauseous from the whirlwind of the author’s processing. I am relieved to be done, yet I know I have to read the book again. His words and reflections resonate with an ancestral me. I have never been to Spain, though my maternal ancestors were emigrants from there. As far as I know, I have no Jewish ancestors. But over the course of my reading I ponder more and more how impossible it seems that we are not each to some degree related within the diaspora of the human soul.
As I read this I found that almost instantly – if I was not terribly distracted, and even when I was – I was drawn in as if by an old friend who by chance meets me on a street in some gray city of my past, and with an arm around my shoulders walks with me and picks up a tale he has been telling me for years. I was captured, almost against my will, and yet mesmerized, flattered and transfixed by the tale and the intimacy of the encounter. I would go into a trance.
It occurred to me fleetingly that the book I insist on writing is no longer necessary now that I have read Sepharad. It is not my book, but the journey I have taken with the author in his book has been exhaustive. And though my own memories and history are different in the details, his writing on the displacement and isolation of those whose home is lost, is not so different from what I would wish to write about, having never had a home at heart. It has made me wonder at the displacement of an individual's soul, and how the history of exile and cruelty and shadow still shines a dim beacon for all of us who might know what it means to be alienated from our own past and future.
"For two or three years I have flirted with the idea of writing a novel, imagined situations and places, like snapshots, or like those posters displayed on large billboards at the entrance to a movie theater. That these stills were never in narrative sequence made them all the more powerful, freed them of the weight and vulgar conventions of a scenario; they were revelations in the present, with no before or after. When I didn't have the money to go inside, I would spend hours looking at the photographs outside the theater, not needing to invent a story to fit them together like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. Each became a mystery, illuminating the others, creating multiple links that I could break or modify at my whim, patterns in which no image nullified the others or gained precedence or lost its uniqueness within the whole."
Here, it is as if Muñoz Molina is describing not only his journey, but mine; or, as if he is describing what living is like for many of us. The journey is our life. From pages 153/154:
"Days before leaving, my life had already been turned by the magnet of my journey, pulled toward the hour of departure, which approached with agonizing slowness. I was still here yet distant, though no one noticed my absence, not from the places I lived and worked, not from the things that were extensions of myself and indicated my existence, my immobilized life, confined to a single city, to a few streets….
"Never was I so obsessed with impossible journeys as then, so distanced from myself and from the tangible and real around me. It wasn't that an important part of me was hidden from others' eyes; my whole self was hidden. The shell that others saw didn't matter at all, it had nothing to do with me. … With literary vanity, I sought refuge in being unknown, hidden, but there was a conformity in me at least as strong as my rebellion, with the difference that the conformity was practical while the rebellion showed only occasionally as a blurry discontent…"
"There were two worlds, one visible and the other invisible, and I adapted tamely to the norms of the first so I could retreat without too much inconvenience into the second."
My thoughts upon completion:
This book didn’t make me want to pick it up between readings. But why should it be the book’s responsibility to make me? It was I who needed this book, and not the other way around. And as I took my time, for weeks, reading it, I was unable to forget that need of mine. I could not find a desire to read anything else between my short sessions with Muñoz Molina’s journey in this novel. And, with each paragraph, each chapter, each page, I was filled up with his poetry of thought and his longing for memory. There was no other way for me to read this book.
His journey is a long one. His memories and reflections, his connections between one train, one place, one tense and another take time. I was surprised each time I picked it up that this book is a light 385 pages, when his travels between the book’s covers are so weighty. The traveling between past and present, between history and personal memoir, between what appears to be fiction and is known to be nonfiction, goes so very deep and so very far. After finally finishing it, I know I am still there, in those pages, almost nauseous from the whirlwind of the author’s processing. I am relieved to be done, yet I know I have to read the book again. His words and reflections resonate with an ancestral me. I have never been to Spain, though my maternal ancestors were emigrants from there. As far as I know, I have no Jewish ancestors. But over the course of my reading I ponder more and more how impossible it seems that we are not each to some degree related within the diaspora of the human soul.
As I read this I found that almost instantly – if I was not terribly distracted, and even when I was – I was drawn in as if by an old friend who by chance meets me on a street in some gray city of my past, and with an arm around my shoulders walks with me and picks up a tale he has been telling me for years. I was captured, almost against my will, and yet mesmerized, flattered and transfixed by the tale and the intimacy of the encounter. I would go into a trance.
It occurred to me fleetingly that the book I insist on writing is no longer necessary now that I have read Sepharad. It is not my book, but the journey I have taken with the author in his book has been exhaustive. And though my own memories and history are different in the details, his writing on the displacement and isolation of those whose home is lost, is not so different from what I would wish to write about, having never had a home at heart. It has made me wonder at the displacement of an individual's soul, and how the history of exile and cruelty and shadow still shines a dim beacon for all of us who might know what it means to be alienated from our own past and future.
May 28, 2012
"Sepharad" is one of the most beautifully written books I have read in a *long* time--most refreshing for a reader who loves language and history. My only problem with this book is that it was billed as a novel. Those looking for a linear tale of suspense that takes place in single setting will be disappointed in this book. This is not a page-turner, but it is worth the work. It reads more like a collection of prose poems linked by characters that appear, disappear, and reappear, mirroring their movement throughout the Diaspora. "Sepharad" is a panoramic history of the Diaspora of Sephardic Jews in Spain during WWII, but it touches on the earlier 15th century Sephardic Diaspora as well. The book's scope and setting is expansive, weaving stories and diverse perspectives both fictional and historical on WWII and it's ripple effects throughout the Western world (Russia, Germany, Hungary, Spain, America, and others)in a breathtaking Rashomon-like tapestry of human love, longing, loss, horror, and hope.
Here are some highlights to showcase Molina's beautiful, masterful, and loving use of language:
"To the person you meet on a train in a foreign country, you are a stranger who exists only in the present. A woman and a man look at each other with a tingle of intrigue and desire as they take seats facing each other: at that moment they are as detached from yesterday and tomorrow and from names as Adam and Eve were when they first looked upon each other in Eden" (Molina, 23).
"The great night of Europe is shot through with long, sinister trains, with convoys of cattle and freight cars with boarded-up windows moving very slowly toward barren, wintry, snow- or mud-covered expanses encircled by barbed wire and guard towers" (Molina, 29-30).
"_Death will come, and she will have your eyes_. To write and to read was to weave a protective and airless cocoon, to drink a potion that would allow me to flee invisible, to take a tunnel that no one knew, to scratch the wall of my cell with the patience of Edmond Dantes. With a silken line of blue ink I spun a world filled with imaginary men and women who softened the harsh edges of reality" (Molina, 324).
"My life had only past and future. The present was a parenthesis, an empty space, like the spaces that separate written words, the automatic touch of a thumb to the long bar of the type-writer, the line that separates two dates on a calendar, the pause between two beats of the heart. I lived from one letter, among the ordinary envelopes on my mail tray, to the next, recognizing it from afar, the moment the clerk came through the door with the large folder of correspondence under his arm, unaware of the treasure he was bringing me" (Molina, 325).
After reading "Sepharad," I am also eager to read Franz Kafka's "Letters to Milena," which are often referenced here.
Here are some highlights to showcase Molina's beautiful, masterful, and loving use of language:
"To the person you meet on a train in a foreign country, you are a stranger who exists only in the present. A woman and a man look at each other with a tingle of intrigue and desire as they take seats facing each other: at that moment they are as detached from yesterday and tomorrow and from names as Adam and Eve were when they first looked upon each other in Eden" (Molina, 23).
"The great night of Europe is shot through with long, sinister trains, with convoys of cattle and freight cars with boarded-up windows moving very slowly toward barren, wintry, snow- or mud-covered expanses encircled by barbed wire and guard towers" (Molina, 29-30).
"_Death will come, and she will have your eyes_. To write and to read was to weave a protective and airless cocoon, to drink a potion that would allow me to flee invisible, to take a tunnel that no one knew, to scratch the wall of my cell with the patience of Edmond Dantes. With a silken line of blue ink I spun a world filled with imaginary men and women who softened the harsh edges of reality" (Molina, 324).
"My life had only past and future. The present was a parenthesis, an empty space, like the spaces that separate written words, the automatic touch of a thumb to the long bar of the type-writer, the line that separates two dates on a calendar, the pause between two beats of the heart. I lived from one letter, among the ordinary envelopes on my mail tray, to the next, recognizing it from afar, the moment the clerk came through the door with the large folder of correspondence under his arm, unaware of the treasure he was bringing me" (Molina, 325).
After reading "Sepharad," I am also eager to read Franz Kafka's "Letters to Milena," which are often referenced here.
July 5, 2022
El homenaje de muñoz molina a los excluidos de la historia, a los perseguidos por su raza , religión o por haber sido los perdedores de una guerra.
May 30, 2013
It took me a while to figure out this novel, but what kept me interested throughout was the excellent storytelling, the excellent voices of the narrators, and the way Molina keeps you off-balance with changing person, voice, and story.
What does hold the various stories together is the way they all show the effects of totalitarianism on individuals, real and invented. A lot is about exile and self-imposed exile, even exile while still living in one’s homeland. There is a lot of nostalgia, confusion, and ruined or lost relationships. It’s a humanizing of something that was inhuman, or at least the abuse of what is human (because, sadly, what is more human than abusing other humans, directly and indirectly, intentionally or not).
What does hold the various stories together is the way they all show the effects of totalitarianism on individuals, real and invented. A lot is about exile and self-imposed exile, even exile while still living in one’s homeland. There is a lot of nostalgia, confusion, and ruined or lost relationships. It’s a humanizing of something that was inhuman, or at least the abuse of what is human (because, sadly, what is more human than abusing other humans, directly and indirectly, intentionally or not).
July 21, 2024
Una obra magistral, muy dura, como son los temas que trata: el holocausto, las purgas comunistas, la guerra civil española, el exilio... Imprescindible como llamada de atención contra la intolerancia, el racismo y el egoismo generalizado... Me ha costado quitármela de la cabeza. Imprescindible lectura
August 13, 2019
Book Review:Sepharad by Antonio Munoz Molina
A book I thoroughly enjoyed yet am at a loss to describe. What is it about? What are the themes? Is it a novel? Is it autofiction? Is it an extended essay? All these questions roll around as I attempt to pull this review together. I read through some notes I jotted down as I read through this magnificent piece of literature.
The book begins with people in the process of travel. Bus riders; train occupants; strangers meeting up travelers on the road enamored with The “lightness of being” ( a shout out to Kundera) one experiences when away from home and daily routines.
The narrator riffs on books he read while he too was on the road: on a trip to Patagonia, in a hotel room in Buenos Aires he reads Bruce Chatwin’s masterpiece while at the same time Chatwin lies bedridden close to death from an unnamed virus.
Exiles, never able to return home, subjected to round-ups, in Europe and in Moscow, grabbed by fascist Nazis or Communist revolutionaries, ‘with beating hearts we fixed our attention on the sound of boots closer and closer”, and as I read these historical events I cannot but think of the undocumented immigrants, my neighbors right here in America as they cower in this age of Trump and his ICE troops. He names names: Professor Klemperer, a WWI Iron Cross recipient, a war hero of the German nation of Jewish descent goes about his daily routines in denial that the rising fascist forces would ensnare him, Eugenia Ginzberg, a Communist party member refuses to notice the alarm signals she ends up in the Gulag for 18 years.
Many of the stories told are from the Iberian Peninsula. Molina well aware of the history of persecution, the Inquisition a 15th century stain on the Spanish country, he narrates the story of Senor Salama who escaped from Budapest, he and his son on a business trip while his wife and daughters are caught and sent to Auschwitz. He and his son make their way to safety in Tangiers, his son retuning to Spain after the war, the father left to decide should he stay or go to Israel, of the Moroccans he says, “I hope they throw us out with better manners than the Hungarians, or the Spanish in 1492…Sepharad was the name of our true homeland, although we’d been expelled from it more than four centuries ago. My father told me that for generations out family kept the key of the house that had been ours in Toledo, and he detailed every journey they’d made since they left Spain, as if he were telling me about a single life that had lasted nearly five hundred years, He always spoke in the first person plural: WE emigrated to North Africa, and then some of US made our homes in Salonika, and others in Istanbul, to which WE brought the first printing presses, and in the nineteenth century WE arrived in Bulgaria…involved in the grain trade along the ports of the Danube, settled in Budapest. WE were Spanish, my father would say, using his prideful plural. Did you know that a 1924 decree restored Spanish nationality to the Sephardim?”
Molina writes of insomnia, reading in bed he turns the light out but “I’ve missed falling asleep the way you miss a train, by a minute, by seconds and I know that I will have to wait for it to return and that it may be hours before it comes. When I can’t fall asleep, the ghosts of the dead return, the ghosts of the living as well, people I haven’t seen or thought of in a long time, events, actions, names from earlier lives, laced not with nostalgia, but rather with regret or shame, Fear returns too, a childish fear of the dark, of shadows or shapes that take on the form of an animal or a human presence of the door about to open.” He goes on to describe a Willi Munzenberg in Moscow, 1936 lying awake next to his wife, and every time he heard footsteps in the corridor outside their room, he thought with a shudder of clearsighted panic, ‘they’ve come, they’re here’.
These are the stories and people Molina writes about, the terror, the uprootedness, the alienation, the persecuted, these are people of the Sepharad. How the assimilated Jews of Germany, the war heroes, those proud of German culture, Molina’s interpretation of Kafka how “you can wake up one morning at an unpleasant hour of the working man and discover you’ve been transformed into an enormous insect. You can go to your usual café believing that nothing has changed, and learn from the newspaper that you are not the person you thought you were and no longer safe from shame and persecution”. The Nuremberg Laws changed everything in a day, you were no longer a German, you were a Jew, made to wear a yellow star and be expelled from daily customs.
As the book nears its end, the narrator relates his visit to Germany to lecture about his latest book, unable to sleep he finds himself in a café filled with older Germans, imagining them as they might have been fifty years earlier, stiff armed salutes yelling Heil Hitler and then further imagining himself sitting there “wearing a yellow star stitched on my overcoat…had I been in this same pastry shop, would one of those men, in a black leather coat, have approached me and asked for my papers.”
Molina reflects on all he has written, the Inquisition, the Nazi terror, the Stalin purges, the pogroms, all of those lives lost, many in unburied graves, and asks: “each had a life unlike any other, just as each face, each voice was unique, and the horror of each death was unrepeatable even though it happened amid so many millions of similar deaths, How, when there are so many lives that deserve to be told, one can attempt to invent a novel for each, in a vast network of interlinking novels and lives?”
Indeed, Molina has answered his own question. This masterpiece, his book, Sepharad, is a testament to those many lives.
A book I thoroughly enjoyed yet am at a loss to describe. What is it about? What are the themes? Is it a novel? Is it autofiction? Is it an extended essay? All these questions roll around as I attempt to pull this review together. I read through some notes I jotted down as I read through this magnificent piece of literature.
The book begins with people in the process of travel. Bus riders; train occupants; strangers meeting up travelers on the road enamored with The “lightness of being” ( a shout out to Kundera) one experiences when away from home and daily routines.
The narrator riffs on books he read while he too was on the road: on a trip to Patagonia, in a hotel room in Buenos Aires he reads Bruce Chatwin’s masterpiece while at the same time Chatwin lies bedridden close to death from an unnamed virus.
Exiles, never able to return home, subjected to round-ups, in Europe and in Moscow, grabbed by fascist Nazis or Communist revolutionaries, ‘with beating hearts we fixed our attention on the sound of boots closer and closer”, and as I read these historical events I cannot but think of the undocumented immigrants, my neighbors right here in America as they cower in this age of Trump and his ICE troops. He names names: Professor Klemperer, a WWI Iron Cross recipient, a war hero of the German nation of Jewish descent goes about his daily routines in denial that the rising fascist forces would ensnare him, Eugenia Ginzberg, a Communist party member refuses to notice the alarm signals she ends up in the Gulag for 18 years.
Many of the stories told are from the Iberian Peninsula. Molina well aware of the history of persecution, the Inquisition a 15th century stain on the Spanish country, he narrates the story of Senor Salama who escaped from Budapest, he and his son on a business trip while his wife and daughters are caught and sent to Auschwitz. He and his son make their way to safety in Tangiers, his son retuning to Spain after the war, the father left to decide should he stay or go to Israel, of the Moroccans he says, “I hope they throw us out with better manners than the Hungarians, or the Spanish in 1492…Sepharad was the name of our true homeland, although we’d been expelled from it more than four centuries ago. My father told me that for generations out family kept the key of the house that had been ours in Toledo, and he detailed every journey they’d made since they left Spain, as if he were telling me about a single life that had lasted nearly five hundred years, He always spoke in the first person plural: WE emigrated to North Africa, and then some of US made our homes in Salonika, and others in Istanbul, to which WE brought the first printing presses, and in the nineteenth century WE arrived in Bulgaria…involved in the grain trade along the ports of the Danube, settled in Budapest. WE were Spanish, my father would say, using his prideful plural. Did you know that a 1924 decree restored Spanish nationality to the Sephardim?”
Molina writes of insomnia, reading in bed he turns the light out but “I’ve missed falling asleep the way you miss a train, by a minute, by seconds and I know that I will have to wait for it to return and that it may be hours before it comes. When I can’t fall asleep, the ghosts of the dead return, the ghosts of the living as well, people I haven’t seen or thought of in a long time, events, actions, names from earlier lives, laced not with nostalgia, but rather with regret or shame, Fear returns too, a childish fear of the dark, of shadows or shapes that take on the form of an animal or a human presence of the door about to open.” He goes on to describe a Willi Munzenberg in Moscow, 1936 lying awake next to his wife, and every time he heard footsteps in the corridor outside their room, he thought with a shudder of clearsighted panic, ‘they’ve come, they’re here’.
These are the stories and people Molina writes about, the terror, the uprootedness, the alienation, the persecuted, these are people of the Sepharad. How the assimilated Jews of Germany, the war heroes, those proud of German culture, Molina’s interpretation of Kafka how “you can wake up one morning at an unpleasant hour of the working man and discover you’ve been transformed into an enormous insect. You can go to your usual café believing that nothing has changed, and learn from the newspaper that you are not the person you thought you were and no longer safe from shame and persecution”. The Nuremberg Laws changed everything in a day, you were no longer a German, you were a Jew, made to wear a yellow star and be expelled from daily customs.
As the book nears its end, the narrator relates his visit to Germany to lecture about his latest book, unable to sleep he finds himself in a café filled with older Germans, imagining them as they might have been fifty years earlier, stiff armed salutes yelling Heil Hitler and then further imagining himself sitting there “wearing a yellow star stitched on my overcoat…had I been in this same pastry shop, would one of those men, in a black leather coat, have approached me and asked for my papers.”
Molina reflects on all he has written, the Inquisition, the Nazi terror, the Stalin purges, the pogroms, all of those lives lost, many in unburied graves, and asks: “each had a life unlike any other, just as each face, each voice was unique, and the horror of each death was unrepeatable even though it happened amid so many millions of similar deaths, How, when there are so many lives that deserve to be told, one can attempt to invent a novel for each, in a vast network of interlinking novels and lives?”
Indeed, Molina has answered his own question. This masterpiece, his book, Sepharad, is a testament to those many lives.
March 4, 2023
Wandering, rambling, never sure if the same narrator is threading the disparate stories. Some passages very moving, full of pain, carefully constructed, elegantly written. The disjointedness made it difficult to keep my attention between stories.
February 28, 2025
This beautifully crafted and excellent English translation of a magnificent work of writing is a mixed bag.
The book jumps between too many time periods, narrators, and perspectives, making it excessively lengthy and challenging to read. It’s dense and demands constant preparation for each chapter.
Furthermore, it blurs the lines between fiction and reality, which can make the reading experience even more cumbersome.
Despite these obstacles, it did offer some captivating insights into the history of Spain, its existence, and its role during World War II and up to the present day.
The author is not afraid to name-drop. He includes renowned authors like Walter Benjamin, Kafka, Milena, Primo Levi, and Spinoza to either enhance or emphasise the components of his illustrious literary journey.
I commend the author’s efforts and knowledge.
The book jumps between too many time periods, narrators, and perspectives, making it excessively lengthy and challenging to read. It’s dense and demands constant preparation for each chapter.
Furthermore, it blurs the lines between fiction and reality, which can make the reading experience even more cumbersome.
Despite these obstacles, it did offer some captivating insights into the history of Spain, its existence, and its role during World War II and up to the present day.
The author is not afraid to name-drop. He includes renowned authors like Walter Benjamin, Kafka, Milena, Primo Levi, and Spinoza to either enhance or emphasise the components of his illustrious literary journey.
I commend the author’s efforts and knowledge.
October 21, 2014
Esta novela es la historia del viaje del autor desde su Úbeda natal a un concepto de España múchisimo más amplio en tiempo y espacio : en tiempo, desde 1492 y la expulsión de los judíos hasta nuestros días, y en el espacio, desde Úbeda hasta todos los países y todas las ciudades donde hay o han habido gente que conservaba una llave, unas canciones, un apellido o algún otro recuerdo de ese país de que fueron expulsados sus ancestros y que ellos llamaban "Sefarad". Cada capítulo es otra aventura, de manera que el libro parece más una colección de reflexiones y relatos que una novela, donde esperamos seguir el hilo de un protagonista determinado y no las historias de decenas de personas en diferentes épocas y lugares. Pero entonces, después de varias historias aparentemente inconexas, el lector vuelve a encontrar algunos de los mismos personajes que había visto en alguno de los capítulos anteriores, y poco a poco entra en un entramado cada vez más denso. En el curso de este viaje literario, físico y emocional, llegamos a conocer o por lo menos ver veintenas de personas reales, algunas famosas y otras de nombres perdidos con el tiempo, cada uno con algo diferente y muy especial para enseñarnos sobre el siglo pasado, y los anteriores. Muñoz Molina es a la vez explorador y guía, y muy buena compañia en este viaje.
February 21, 2023
Haunting, brilliantly conceived and gorgeously written novel about the memories of people both real and imagined. In 17 loosely connected short stories, Antonio Munoz Molina shows us both the evanescence and fragility of memory, and its centrality in the stories we tell about our lives.
A true treasure of a book from a writer who is new to me.
A true treasure of a book from a writer who is new to me.
December 1, 2008
This is a very hard book to read. It deals mainly with alienation, yearning for a lost past/land, loss, and genocide. I had to take it in small doses or it can really pull you down, because although there are some glimmers of hope and joy, they are small and far between.
I have shelved it as short stories because this is not an usual novel. It is a series of almost-real and real stories, all dealing with the idea of the lost country, the one we left behind, whether it is childhood, youth, freedom, the actual Sefarad or simply the world before the Nazis came. I think that it is true on one hand that the loss for a child that moves to the great city is not so dissimilar to one who is sent to an extermination camp. On the other hand, it is not the same emotion at all, so that weakens the whole book.
It is well written, as it is to be expected from the careful prose of Muñoz Molina and his beutiful mastery of language. However he keeps a careful distance from the text, most of the time, as I suppose was the only way to keep writing among the bleakness. But that once again detracts in a few chapters where we hope for a bit more emotion. Not that he does not feel, he just does not transmit it as well as he does transmit vague unease or guarded joy. Just the way he writes, I suppose.
Despite the (relatively) low score, this is a book I am glad I have read, but I am also glad that I have finished it, at last. Despite the fact that half the stories deal with non-Spanish specific subjects, the whole set is directed to a certain age and certain experiences, making it also quite directed to people with many common aspects with the writer. Which is why I also lower its score as a book, despite its power for me, even (or because) it has taken me over a year to read it.
I have shelved it as short stories because this is not an usual novel. It is a series of almost-real and real stories, all dealing with the idea of the lost country, the one we left behind, whether it is childhood, youth, freedom, the actual Sefarad or simply the world before the Nazis came. I think that it is true on one hand that the loss for a child that moves to the great city is not so dissimilar to one who is sent to an extermination camp. On the other hand, it is not the same emotion at all, so that weakens the whole book.
It is well written, as it is to be expected from the careful prose of Muñoz Molina and his beutiful mastery of language. However he keeps a careful distance from the text, most of the time, as I suppose was the only way to keep writing among the bleakness. But that once again detracts in a few chapters where we hope for a bit more emotion. Not that he does not feel, he just does not transmit it as well as he does transmit vague unease or guarded joy. Just the way he writes, I suppose.
Despite the (relatively) low score, this is a book I am glad I have read, but I am also glad that I have finished it, at last. Despite the fact that half the stories deal with non-Spanish specific subjects, the whole set is directed to a certain age and certain experiences, making it also quite directed to people with many common aspects with the writer. Which is why I also lower its score as a book, despite its power for me, even (or because) it has taken me over a year to read it.
September 10, 2024
Aquest llibre és increïble i no només perquè està extraordinàriament ben escrit amb unes paraules ben triades, amb cura, que et porten d’aquí cap allà en el temps pels capítols més foscos del segle vint.
No només per això, si no perquè és un llibre de llibres on cada capítol comença una nova història amb el seu punt de vista i les seves complicacions. Tot torna a començar, amb una nova primera persona que t’explica la segona guerra mundial i salta a la tercera persona parlant-te de la repressió, l’exili de la guerra civil, de les malalties que s’amaguen dins teu i que t’apareixen de sobte canviant-te la vida per sempre, marcada a la cara com les estrelles de david al pit.
Sefarad que és com es deia la península ibèrica en la tradició jueva. I és que aquest llibre ressegueix la vida d’aquelles persones de les quals ningú s’enrecorda, personatges que van ser importants com Frank Kafka o Milena Jesenská o Primo Levi i que van morir igual com els protagonistes de cada capítol, perduts en algun lloc, sense saber massa bé on. I la por aferrada als gestos i als viatges de tren i a les cartes i a les mirades d’aquells que sabien que els estaven a punt de matar en un país que no era el seu, lluny de tot i de tothom i que moririen i que la història seguria endavant, com si res hagués passat.
Un molt bon llibre que recull d’una forma molt elegant moltes persones oblidades i que et deixa pensant un cop el tanques per anar a dormir.
(Quina gràcia he trigat un mes justament)
No només per això, si no perquè és un llibre de llibres on cada capítol comença una nova història amb el seu punt de vista i les seves complicacions. Tot torna a començar, amb una nova primera persona que t’explica la segona guerra mundial i salta a la tercera persona parlant-te de la repressió, l’exili de la guerra civil, de les malalties que s’amaguen dins teu i que t’apareixen de sobte canviant-te la vida per sempre, marcada a la cara com les estrelles de david al pit.
Sefarad que és com es deia la península ibèrica en la tradició jueva. I és que aquest llibre ressegueix la vida d’aquelles persones de les quals ningú s’enrecorda, personatges que van ser importants com Frank Kafka o Milena Jesenská o Primo Levi i que van morir igual com els protagonistes de cada capítol, perduts en algun lloc, sense saber massa bé on. I la por aferrada als gestos i als viatges de tren i a les cartes i a les mirades d’aquells que sabien que els estaven a punt de matar en un país que no era el seu, lluny de tot i de tothom i que moririen i que la història seguria endavant, com si res hagués passat.
Un molt bon llibre que recull d’una forma molt elegant moltes persones oblidades i que et deixa pensant un cop el tanques per anar a dormir.
(Quina gràcia he trigat un mes justament)
July 24, 2014
Es un magnífico libro, un fresco de emociones, de múltiples escenarios y personajes, algunos de ellos muy familiares, que nos cuenta la experiencia, las historias terribles de aquellos que sufrieron la humillación, el escarnio y en última instancia el exilio -geográfico y vital. Pero no sólo es una recopilación de historias, el libro está lleno de reflexiones sobre los temas más importantes que son tratados con gran lucidez: el paso del tiempo, el sufrimiento, el sentido de la vida.... que es el hilo conductor de esta novela. Pese a la dureza de las historias, el libro es hermoso porque cada línea está dotada de alma, con un estilo muy limpio y cuidado. El libro deja un poso que dura por mucho tiempo.
July 10, 2016
Finished it, but very slowly. Sepharad is a great and complex novel that should be read in sittings of no more than an hour. The narrative rolls seamlessly from person to person, place to place, time to time, so that the shifts are barely perceptible, and each time I became aware of another shift, I had to go back through the pages to discover how that had happened and wonder when I had left behind an imaginary character and encountered a historical one. It is a tapestry of interwoven vignettes about flight, capture, death and escape, over time, that reflect a collective memory of human anguish and suffering and longing for home. Intensely lyrical, brilliant writing.
April 19, 2023
Beautifully written interconnected stories about the Sephardic diaspora; intimate and anguished.
May 7, 2025
solo el fragmento 'tan callando'
November 20, 2016
Wow, this is a book after my own heart. It says on the cover that it's a novel, but I don't think so. Really its a collection of stories which are mostly personal, but with many recurring motifs and themes that link them together. If you are Spanish, or Jewish, or love 20th century European history, or traveling, or have migrated from a provincial city to a major capital, this book will speak to you.
The book is made up of 17 "chapters" each of which can really stand on its own as an independent narrative, for the most part. These are the ones I was most impressed by:
The first chapter/story that really grabbed me was "Olympia" about a business trip the narrator/author made to Madrid in his younger days, where he spent the better part of a day wandering the streets, killing time until his scheduled departure, finally dropping in on an old flame. Its descriptions of the narrator's state of mind, and of Madrid itself (where I have done my fair share of wandering) are so authentic and moving that I had the feeling of: "I could have written this. Why didn't I?"
I also enjoyed "Berghof" which reads more like a traditional short story, about a Spanish doctor on vacation with his family on the Mediterranean coast of Spain, who unexpectedly finds out what really goes on inside one of the luxurious villas overlooking the water.
"Wherever the Man Goes" is a description of what was twenty years ago one of the seedier parts of Madrid (and is now one of the trendier), the neighborhood north of Gran Via, near Plaza de Chueca. I lived in Madrid around the time this was written (late 90s to early 2000's), and his description of the seamy characters who populated this area is spot on. It was a scary and fascinating place back then, and though it has changed mostly for the better, the fact that it will never be the same again adds an aura of nostalgia and melancholy to this clearly drafted chapter.
And of course, the final chapter "Sepharad", largely set in New York, which mentions the Spanish-Jewish cemetery on W11th St, and features a visit to the Hispanic Society on W155th Street, an impressive and nearly deserted treasure-house of Spanish art in an unlikely neighborhood. New York is my lifelong home, and Madrid is my second home and Molina describes them both so clearly and authentically that I immediately trust all of his other descriptions.
Some of the other chapters that touch on Kafka, Primo Levi, and various European Jews of the 20th Century I found interesting, but less engaging. Obviously these chapters are based more on the author's reading than on his personal experience. But Molina is making an admirable attempt to weave the history of Spain (which can sometimes feel like an island unto itself) into the broader history of Europe, and to integrate the important and tragic role Jews have played in both of those histories.
Again, I wouldn't call it a novel, and it doesn't even read as fiction for the most part. But I loved it, and think it's a great and unique work.
The book is made up of 17 "chapters" each of which can really stand on its own as an independent narrative, for the most part. These are the ones I was most impressed by:
The first chapter/story that really grabbed me was "Olympia" about a business trip the narrator/author made to Madrid in his younger days, where he spent the better part of a day wandering the streets, killing time until his scheduled departure, finally dropping in on an old flame. Its descriptions of the narrator's state of mind, and of Madrid itself (where I have done my fair share of wandering) are so authentic and moving that I had the feeling of: "I could have written this. Why didn't I?"
I also enjoyed "Berghof" which reads more like a traditional short story, about a Spanish doctor on vacation with his family on the Mediterranean coast of Spain, who unexpectedly finds out what really goes on inside one of the luxurious villas overlooking the water.
"Wherever the Man Goes" is a description of what was twenty years ago one of the seedier parts of Madrid (and is now one of the trendier), the neighborhood north of Gran Via, near Plaza de Chueca. I lived in Madrid around the time this was written (late 90s to early 2000's), and his description of the seamy characters who populated this area is spot on. It was a scary and fascinating place back then, and though it has changed mostly for the better, the fact that it will never be the same again adds an aura of nostalgia and melancholy to this clearly drafted chapter.
And of course, the final chapter "Sepharad", largely set in New York, which mentions the Spanish-Jewish cemetery on W11th St, and features a visit to the Hispanic Society on W155th Street, an impressive and nearly deserted treasure-house of Spanish art in an unlikely neighborhood. New York is my lifelong home, and Madrid is my second home and Molina describes them both so clearly and authentically that I immediately trust all of his other descriptions.
Some of the other chapters that touch on Kafka, Primo Levi, and various European Jews of the 20th Century I found interesting, but less engaging. Obviously these chapters are based more on the author's reading than on his personal experience. But Molina is making an admirable attempt to weave the history of Spain (which can sometimes feel like an island unto itself) into the broader history of Europe, and to integrate the important and tragic role Jews have played in both of those histories.
Again, I wouldn't call it a novel, and it doesn't even read as fiction for the most part. But I loved it, and think it's a great and unique work.
April 4, 2020
An absolutely remarkable book; this is not so much of a novel as a collection of narratives from diverse times and backgrounds. The theme, such as it is, is about death, injustice, prejudice, sorrow and happiness. This book requires readers to be alert and fully engaged. It took me a while to get used to the style, particularly that sometimes in the middle of a paragraph the person speaking changes. For example, wife begins the conversation and then the husband's perspective takes over. The dialogue is almost prose. Here's an example: "Bits and pieces of you are left behind in other lives, rooms you lived in that others now occupy, photographs or keepsakes or books that belonged to you and now someone you don't know is touching and looking at, letters still in existence when the person who wrote them and the person who received them and kept them for a long, long time are dead. Far from you, scenes from your life are relived, and in them you're a fiction, a secondary character in a book, a passerby in the film or novel of another persons life." Or this: " I imagined the suicide in morbid detail. From a literary point of view, was shooting oneself or killing oneself slowly with alcohol a form of heroism? I watched the hopeless drunks in the dark taverns of the side streets with both admiration and disgust, for each hid a terrible truth whose price was self-destruction. "
July 13, 2008
I tried. If I had a shelf for, is-it-just-me-or-does-the-emperor-have-no-clothes, this would be on it. It got great reviews from all the snobby publications, and I simply couldn't make heads or tails of it. I didn't get any sense of a novel, and I never quite learned who the narrator (narrators?) was. It felt like each chapter was meant to be its own short story, but within each of those, several different tales were being told in an almost stream-of-consciousness way. One minute we're Catholic Spaniards, the next minute we're Holocaust victims/refugees in various eastern European locations, etc. Maybe I should have given this more of a chance, but I had trouble giving it even the 50 pages I feel I owe any given book before deciding to discard it.
July 30, 2017
afortunadamente y luego de 300 páginas de algunas historias algo cansinas, decidí continuar con este libro. aunque me tomó mucho tiempo, me gustó la temática del mismo. Muñoz Molina nos recuerda que la xenofobia, el odio a eso que desconocemos y los prejuicios, ya no tienen lugar en nuestra civilización, que deben ser superados y aprender de episodios de la historia que no serán borrados jamás, pero que deben servirnos para ser mejores, en lo posible.
May 10, 2018
أغلبها _ أو أغلب ما قرأته فيها لأني مخلصتهاش _ يتحدث عن يهودي هارب من الاضطهاد النازي وحنينه للعيش بأمان. شعرت فيها بانها رواية غرضية موجهة، لذلك لم اكملها.
November 21, 2018
بروبوجاندا يهودية لتسول التعاطف مع معاناة اليهود
تقدر تعنبرها سفر توراتي خبيث هدفه ترسيخ فكرة اليهود المضطهدين عبر التاريخ
هم اساسا اخلاقياتهم وممارساتهم جنت عليهم بسبب خبث نواياهم تجاة باقي البشر
تقدر تعنبرها سفر توراتي خبيث هدفه ترسيخ فكرة اليهود المضطهدين عبر التاريخ
هم اساسا اخلاقياتهم وممارساتهم جنت عليهم بسبب خبث نواياهم تجاة باقي البشر
June 7, 2022
You think you know one historical tragedy from another, until somebody like Antonio Muñoz Molina shows you how seamlessly related they are. This novel of flight and escape (and those who didn’t make it) shifts from the Spanish Civil War (and its refugees and victims), to the expulsion of the Jews from Spain in 1492, to those who hid and made it (and those who didn’t) during World War II, to the nun who escapes her cloister, the girl from a village who makes her adult life in the capital... For a reader like me who likes to think he gets 20th century history (but knows if from a Pax Americana point of view) it was unsettling, and revealing, to encounter that history retold with Spain at the center.
July 24, 2022
No he leído este libro "del tirón", necesitaba comprender bien lo que se narraba en cada una de las pequeñas novelas incluidas en el libro y para eso se necesita una enciclopedia al lado (o internet) ya que AMM tiene una cultura increíble y eso se refleja en su obra pero no impide que se disfrute de las historias que narra. Me pasa lo mismo con Umberto Eco, autores muy cultos sin ser prepotentes (o por lo menos esa es mi impresión)
April 18, 2024
Muy bien escrito, aunque no es para leer del tirón
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