Like a Fading Shadow

Starred review from May 29, 2017
Blurring fiction, memoir, and biography, the absorbing latest from Molina tells two stories: James Earl Ray’s 10-day excursion to Lisbon while on the run after assassinating Martin Luther King Jr. in 1968, and the author’s own research trip to the same city in 1987 when writing his first novel, A Winter in Lisbon. Ray, living under an alias, travels using a Canadian passport and chooses Lisbon on a whim. Once there, he sleeps with prostitutes, drinks, and attempts to gain passage to Rhodesia, where he believes the colony’s white supremacist movement will embrace him. Nearly 20 years later, Molina, a new father, travels to Lisbon for the first time, looking for literary inspiration. As his travels to Portugal continue over the years, his marriage dissolves, he takes up with a new partner, and he becomes interested in Ray’s brief stay. The novel reconstructs the past with incredible detail, and Molina spins multiple possibilities for moments when Ray’s actions are uncertain. The result is a fascinating dual portrait of a writer looking into the clouded mind of a murderer.

June 1, 2017
In the days after his assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., a frantic James Earl Ray knocks around Lisbon.Spanish author Munoz Molina's (In the Night of Time, 2016, etc.) latest work is not a typical retelling of an important moment in history. Closely following Ray's path but intertwining it with Munoz Molina's own writing process, the book delicately oscillates between an author's quest for truth and a criminal's search for safety. Through short but dense narrative fragments, Munoz Molina explores the mind of a killer by comparing it to his own. "A novel is a state of mind, a warm interior where you seek refuge as you write, a cocoon that is weaved from the inside, locking you within it, showing you the world outside through its translucent concavity. A novel is a confession and a hideout," Munoz Molina writes. Readers will follow Ray through his various identities in Lisbon, London, and the United States, during the moments leading up to the assassination, through his escape, hiding, and capture. But the reader will also be witness to Munoz Molina's writing process, the moment he fell in love with his wife, his discovery of Ray's trajectory, and, finally, the completion of his project. Interestingly enough, Munoz Molina does not seem concerned with humanizing Ray--this will come as a relief for some readers. Instead, the author focuses on understanding the novel as a mind, one that can be interwoven with that of other individuals and ultimately hybridized to create a body of work that "subjects life to its own limits and at the same time opens it up to an exploration of depths that are within and without you and that only you were meant to discover." A tragically poetic study of the calamity that set back the civil rights movement.

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Starred review from May 1, 2017
The criminal eluding capture for just over one year, trying to disappear by making himself unmemorable; the writer tracking him years later, erasing himself to follow another person's journey, physical and emotionala fascinating premise made all the more intriguing by the autobiographical elements of the novel. Molina, a highly respected and award-winning Spanish author (In the Night of Time, 2013), tells the story of James Earl Ray's attempt to escape after killing Martin Luther King, Jr., in 1968; Ray's flight eventually takes him to Lisbon, where Molina was struggling to launch his writing career. Mixing the account of Ray on the run with his own coming-of-age story, Molina ponders deep philosophical questions: How does our experience of history, or our collective memory, affect our future? Do our lives and actions have lasting meaning? This is a stylistically complex novel, with shifts of perspective and time, and gorgeously layered language, a book in which to lose oneself, like Italo Calvino's If on a Winter's Night a Traveler (1979). Molina's compelling tale also evokes comparisons to Don DeLillo's historiographic metafiction, especially in Libra (1988), which explores Lee Harvey Oswald much in the manner that Molina writes about James Earl Ray.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2017, American Library Association.)

October 1, 2017

Although this is not at all a rehabilitation of Martin Luther King assassin James Earl Ray, history-loving Molina (In the Night of Time; Manuscript of Ashes) steeps readers in the details of Ray's life, such as his clumsy handling of guns despite being a crack shot and the contradictions in how people recalled him. The novel focuses on his ten-day stay in the magically luminous city of Lisbon, Portugal, after killing King and awaiting passage to some colonial African state where his white supremacism will be appreciated. Years after 1968, Molina travels to Lisbon in search of literary enlightenment and finds it in Ray's brief association with the city; this, too, becomes part of the narrative. There is a veritable cascade of detail with multiple possibilities for moments when Ray's actions are uncertain. The result is a dual portrait of a writer seeking inspiration and then examining the clouded mind of that inspiration. VERDICT The author feels that the novel is somehow consecrated by the facts of history, and those readers who feel the same as he does will revel in this work. Others may complain of too many individual trees and not enough forest. [See Prepub Alert, 2/6/17.]--Jack Shreve, Chicago

Copyright 2017 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

March 15, 2017

Winner of the Planeta and Principe de Asturias prizes, Spanish author Munoz Molina draws on recently declassified FBI files as he tracks James Earl Ray to Canada, London, and finally Lisbon after he assassinates Martin Luther King Jr. Reconstructing events allows Munoz Molina to inject himself into the proceedings as he ponders the act of writing a novel.

Copyright 2017 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.