Five years ago, the English language publication of an astonishing novel, "Sepharad," announced to American readers that Spanish letters had given rise to a previously overlooked European master, Antonio Munoz Molina.
Munoz Molina, now 52, had hardly escaped notice in his native land, where his novels and journalism already had made him one of the most honored writers of his generation and the youngest to be elected to the Royal Spanish Academy. In the English-speaking world, "Sepharad" was widely -- and favorably -- compared to the German-born W.G. Sebald's meta-fictions with their intricate blend of fact and imagination, of obscure individual lives and sweeping historic events, all building to a meditation on the moral horror that was the 20th century. Borrowing the ancient Ladino name for Spain as the novel's title, Munoz Molina intertwined the expulsion of the Jews at the conclusion of the Reconquista in 1492 with the deportations to Auschwitz, tales of the Spanish Civil War with the real lives of Franz Kafka, Primo Levi and the Comintern agent Willi Munzenberg. In this intricate, 17-chapter construction, time and identity became mutable; only memory was held sacred as the state of ultimate moral recourse.
"A Manuscript of Ashes" was Munoz Molina's first novel, published in Spain in 1986, although he reportedly began it shortly after the death of Franco, more than a decade earlier. It's now clear that his preoccupation with the civil war and its aftermath -- a heritage of violence and betrayal, of loyalty and accommodation -- has been with Munoz Molina from the start. So too a fearless willingness to let the influences of popular culture work their way through his novels -- a characteristic of so much of Spain's superb contemporary literary fiction. (It's interesting that the best Spanish writers avoid the obvious temptations to respond to history as their Latin American colleagues have with the cinematic impulse into magic realism. One suspects the Spaniards' deep and authentic sense of tragedy forecloses that option.)
Take this passage from Munoz Molina's novel "Winter in Lisbon," which borrows fruitfully from film noir and jazz: "On the Gran Via, by the cold gleaming windows of the Telefonica building, he went over to a kiosk to buy cigarettes. As I watched him walk back, tall, swaying, hands sunk in the pockets of his large open overcoat with the collar turned up, I realized that he had that strong air of character one always finds in people who carry a past, as in those who carry a gun. These aren't vague literary comparisons: he did have a past, and he kept a gun."
