Antonio Muñoz Molina: La noche de los tiempos (UK: The Depths of Time; US: In the Night of Time)

noche

The latest addition to my website is Antonio Muñoz Molina‘s La noche de los tiempos (UK: The Depths of Time; US: In the Night of Time), a very long book telling the story of a successful architect from a relatively poor background during the period leading up to the Spanish Civil War and the period at the beginning of the war. Ignacio Abel has made a successful but bourgeois marriage. He is not happy in his marriage so when he meets Judith Biely, a US national of Russian descent who loves Madrid, they start an affair. But with the war starting and life difficult, he accepts a job offer in the United States but feels he has betrayed his country by leaving. However, when he returns, the Madrid he finds – violence and death everywhere – is not the Madrid he knew and loved. Muñoz Molina jumps backwards and forwards throughout the novel – from Ignacio’s architectural studies in the Bauhaus to the early part of the Civil War, telling us the story of a man conflicted in both his political and personal life. As always with Antonio Muñoz Molina, it is a first-class story, superbly told and it is nice to find a recent Spanish novel available in English.

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