Snippet: Muñoz Molina’s “Lonely walking”

 

This experiment has been based on Muñoz Molina’s mentioning that he likes handmade things; the blogger used ink instead of a pencil for better visibility, next time he will write a little bigger, apologies…

El País in English offers an interview with the author (Feb. 19, 2018)

On March 12, 2018, the longlist for the Man Booker International Prize 2018 was announced, and Antonio Muñoz Molina is on it with the book Like a fading shadow

Original title: Como la sombra que se va (2014). More information from the publisher; a review from Kirkus. And the blog post from 2014.

UPDATE November 2021:

Un andar solitario has been published in English as To Walk Alone in the Crowd (publisher’s page). There is a review from Kirkus. The NY Times and the Wall Street Journal have also reviews behind their respective paywalls. The novel also won the 2020 Prix Médicis étranger (Wikipedia).

SOURCE: Seix Barral (Planeta; publisher)

Snippet: Antonio Muñoz Molina, “Como la sombra que se va”

Publisher’s summary:

A city, a magnicide, an obsession. The flight of an assassin who couldn’t kill a dream of liberty.

On 4 April 1968 Martin Luther King was assassinated. While on the run, James Earl Ray, his assassin, spent ten days in Lisbon trying to get a visa for Angola. Obsessed with this fascinating man, and helped by the recent opening of the FBI files on the case, Antonio Muñoz Molina reconstructs Ray’s crime, flight and capture, but above all his steps through the city. Lisbon is scenery and essential character of this novel, as it receives three journeys that alternate in the writer’s gaze: the one of James Earl Ray the fugitive in 1968; the one of a young Antonio who in 1987 visits in search of the inspiration to write the novel that would make him an established author, El invierno en Lisboa [Winter in Lisbon]; and the one of the man who writes this story today from the necessity to discover something essential about these two total strangers. Original, passionate and honest, Como la sombra que se va [Like the shadow that disappears] addresses from maturity relevant topics of Antonio Muñoz Molina’s work: the difficulty of faithfully recreating the past, the instant’s fragility, identity’s construction, fortuity as engine of reality or human rights’ vulnerability; but here they come into a form through a completely free first person who investigates essentially the process of writing itself.

SOURCE: Planeta