In the Night of Time

September 30, 2013
A War and Peace for the Spanish Civil War, this classically sweeping novel from Molina (A Manuscript of Ashes) follows a large cast of characters, intermingling real and fictional figures, through times of both peaceful routine and grotesque violence. Molina begins with Spanish architect Ignacio Abel’s escape from a besieged Madrid in 1936, showing how his fragmented recollections of pre-Civil War Spain bleed into his present circumstances. Ignacio, who rose from a working-class background to a brilliant career, has always been skeptical of utopian ideals. The trappings of Spanish culture—the bull fight, Catholicism, the “picturesque backwardness” of the poor—strike him as equally foolish. By middle age, he finds himself in a loveless marriage and a stultifying, bourgeois life. When Ignacio meets Judith Biely, a young American whose idealism contrasts with his pragmatism, he falls into an affair that feels like it will last forever. But of course, as with architecture, “nothing occurs in an abstract time or a blank space”; the outside world and the couple’s own differing worldviews pull them apart. Molina offers insight into the individual’s plight in an incomprehensible and uncontrollable world, but some careful editing might have improved this long read’s pacing without losing its impressive effect.

Starred review from December 1, 2013
Superb novel of the Spanish Civil War, ranking among the best of the many books written about that conflict. The war of 1936-39 remains an unhealed wound, and Molina (Sepharad, 2003, etc.) runs a certain risk--as, recently, did Javier Cercas with Soldiers of Salamis--in revisiting it. He does so from the point of view of an architect, Ignacio Abel, who has risen from the ranks of the working poor, his bricklayer father scorning and pitying him for his lack of macho strength, living a life in which "feeling the blow of the slap that hadn't yet struck his pale face" constitutes business as usual. Ignacio is a socialist but no firebrand; even so, he feels himself in danger, and throughout the narrative, even in flight, he wrestles with the question of whether he should stay in Spain and fight or move on to some place such as New York, where he has both a reputation and a lover. Problem is, even as he's wrestling with rationalizations (which "sounded like the lie of someone who's going to desert"), his lover is bent on going to Spain to join the loyalist cause herself. Ignacio is something of a cipher, even as others in his circle do their best to remain safe and anonymous--and for good reason, since Molina delivers a scathing, Goya-esque view of war: "Now the long whistles of mortars, and a few seconds later the earth rose in the fields along the highway like streams of lava in an erupting volcano." Molina writes with the epic sweep of Boris Pasternak, claiming the space hitherto occupied by the non-Spanish novelist Ernest Hemingway; his story is long but without a slack moment, as it carefully builds a portrait of a world that has disappeared and a moment that is about to: "Think of how big the world is," as Ignacio says, "how complicated it is for two people to meet. We've been lucky twice--there won't be another time." A simple love story at one level, a broad portrait of a nation in flames at another, and a masterwork through and through.

COPYRIGHT(2013) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

Starred review from November 1, 2013
It is 1936. War-weary Spanish architect Ignacio Abel travelsfrom Valencia to France to New York and then, finally, by train into the wooded Hudson Valleyto a lifesaver of an academic job at a small upstate university. And, he hopes, to a reunion with Judith Biely, the American woman with whom he had a passionate extramarital affair in Madrid a year earlier and for whom he has been searching, constantly, since she didn't appear at their usual rendezvous spot in crumbling, war-frantic Madrid. He has escaped the war, it would appear, but he is alone, near broke, and haunted by memories and regrets. His tailored European suits are frayed and out of place. As in A Manuscript of Ashes (2008), Molina is interested in the legacy of violence and the messy interplay between the past and the present. Although more traditional in its form than some of his earlier works, this selection covers a lot of ground rather slowly (paying considerable attention to, for example, the bourgeois trappings of Ignacio and his conservative wife, Adela) and tends to circle back repeatedly to key events and images. Readers who persist will be rewarded with a large rough-cut gem of a story that lingers in one's mind. Molina recently won the Jerusalem Prize and the Asturias Prize, and he appears to be finally getting the international attention he deserves.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2013, American Library Association.)

July 1, 2013

Winner of the 2011 Prix Mediterranne Etranger, the French award for best foreign-language novel, this work opens in October 1936 with Spanish architect Ignacio Abel arriving at New York's Penn Station, having abandoned his wife and children to the rising ferocity of the Spanish civil war in pursuit of a brightly burning affair with an American woman. The U.S. publication of Munoz Molina's Sepharad in 2003 was met with rapturous reviews ("a masterpiece," New York Review of Books), and with the redoubtable Grossman as translator this book can't miss for sophisticated readers.

Copyright 2013 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

November 15, 2013

Spain's distinguished Munoz Molina (creative writing in Spanish, New York Univ.; A Manuscript of Ashes), most recently the winner of the Prince of Asturias Prize for literature, here tells the story of a successful Spanish architect named Ignacio Abel who has worked his way up from humble origins to supervise the construction of Madrid's University City during the Second Republic on the eve of the Spanish Civil War. A father of two, married to the conventional Adela (who, unlike her friend, the wife of poet Juan Ramon Jimenez, no longer shares in the creative process of her husband's work), Ignacio meets the alluring and intelligent American Judith Biely. Adela finds out about the affair and attempts suicide, whereupon Judith returns to the United States. Hoping to join her, Ignacio accepts a commission at a small private college in New York. However, Judith is ardently committed to the Second Republic and decides to return to Ignacio's homeland. VERDICT This is a sweeping portrait of one man's obsessive search for an elusive love against the bloody backdrop of a nation at war with itself. [See Prepub Alert, 6/10/13.]--Jack Shreve, Chicago

Copyright 2013 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.