Sepharad
A Novel
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
An “amazing” novel about the diaspora of Sephardic Jews amid the tumult of twentieth century history (The Washington Post Book World).
From one of Spain’s most celebrated writers, this extraordinary blend of fiction, history, and memoir tells the story of the Sephardic diaspora through seventeen interlinked chapters.
“If Balzac wrote The Human Comedy, [Antonio] Muñoz Molina has written the adventure of exile, solitude, and memory,” Arturo Pérez-Reverte observed of this “masterpiece” that shifts seamlessly from the past to the present along the escape routes employed by Sephardic Jews across countries and continents as they fled Hitler’s Holocaust and Stalin’s purges in the mid-twentieth century (The New York Review of Books).
In a remarkable display of narrative dexterity, Muñoz Molina fashions a “rich and complex story” out of the experiences of people both real and imagined: Eugenia Ginzburg and Greta Buber-Neumann, one on a train to the gulag, the other heading toward a Nazi concentration camp; a shoemaker and a nun who become lovers in a small Spanish town; and Primo Levi, bound for Auschwitz (Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel). From the well-known to the virtually unknown, all of Muñoz Molina’s characters are voices of separation, nostalgia, love, and endless waiting.
“Stories that vibrate beneath the burden of history, that lift with the breath of human life.” —Los Angeles Times Book Review
“A magnificent novel about the iniquity and horror of fanaticism, and especially the human being’s indestructible spirit.” —Mario Vargas Llosa
“Moving and often astonishing.” —The New York Times
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Award-winning Spanish author Mu oz Molina explores themes of memory and exile in this dense, ardent volume, his second to be translated into English (after Winter in Lisbon). "I have invented very little in the stories and voices that weave through this book," he writes in his author's note; in 17 chapters linked by theme and subject, readers meet men and women both real and imagined in the shadow of the Holocaust and the regimes of Stalin and Franco. In "Copenhagen," Mu oz Molina reflects on the relationship between narrative and travel: on Franz Kafka's affair with Milena Jesenka, which was "crisscrossed with letters and trains," and a Jewish acquaintance's memory of a trip to Paris in 1944, when a jammed hotel door sparked the terror of a captivity narrowly avoided. In "Silencing Everything," a man from Madrid recalls his experiences as a soldier in Russia during WWII, and in "Sacristan," a man who left his small village for the city mourns the changes in his childhood home. The author himself appears as a character, a man in exile from his own life, drowning in his search for stories: "I have flirted," he says, "with the idea of writing a novel, imagined situations and places, like snapshots...." Mu oz Molina's stories are intensely engrossing, but his prose can be tricky: he might switch mid-paragraph, for instance, from first-person to third-person narration, and his descriptions of physical details can take on the tone of an incantatory recitation. But patient readers will be richly rewarded by a nuanced view into a foreign world.
