Sepharad [Hardcover]

Antonio Munoz Molina (Author), Margaret Sayers Peden (Translator)

Book Description

Publication Date: December 8, 2003

From one of Spain's most celebrated writers, an extraordinary, inspired book-at once fiction, history, and memoir-that draws on the Sephardic diaspora, the Holocaust, and Stalin's purges to tell a twentieth-century story.
Shifting seamlessly from the past to the present and following the routes of escape across countries and continents, Muñoz Molina evokes people real and imagined who come together in a richly allusive pattern-from Eugenia Ginsburg to Grete Buber-Neumann, the one on a train to the gulag, the other to a Nazi concentration camp; from a shoemaker and a nun who become lovers in a small town in Spain to Primo Levi bound for Auschwitz. And others-some well known, others unknown-all voices of separation, nostalgia, love, and endless waiting.
Written with clarity of vision and passion, in a style both lyrical and accessible, Sepharad makes the experience our own.
A brilliant achievement.

(20060501)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Award-winning Spanish author Munoz 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," Munoz 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...." Munoz 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.
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From Booklist

Acclaimed Spanish novelist Munoz Molina's elegiacally beautiful novel begins with a poetic meditation on the bittersweet nostalgia that seizes those who live in exile. Now in Madrid, Munoz Molina's wistful narrator bemoans the fact that memories of his village boyhood are fading quickly and irretrievably. But it soon becomes clear that the past the narrator and the author are truly grappling with encompasses the entire Sephardic diaspora and the unfathomable horror and mass insanity of Hitler's and Stalin's regimes. How, Munoz Molina seems to ask, can a writer possibly convey such apocalyptic shock, terror, and grief? His answer: by awakening empathy through illuminating the psyches of the displaced and the tortured; by jettisoning the orderliness of a linear narrative, and the distinction between fiction and history, to construct, instead, a labyrinth within which the reader wanders into one vivid, precious, and lost world after another. Calling on such inspiring figures as Franz Kafka and Primo Levi for guidance, Munoz Molina creates astute, deeply felt, and exquisitely expressive testimony to love, suffering, and the astonishing fecundity of human consciousness. Donna Seaman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 400 pages
• Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt; 1 edition (December 8, 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0151009015
• ISBN-13: 978-0151009015
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 6.3 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (10 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #683,922 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

25 of 25 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Love, Suffering and Loss, February 18, 2004

By 

"rovingreader" (Little Compton, RI USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Sepharad (Hardcover)

In this novel Munoz Molina sets out to do the impossible, to remember those who have perished in the great disasters of our century and before. As he says, "Love, suffering, even some of the greatest hells on Earth are erased after one or two generations, and a day comes when there is not one living witness who can remember."
The narrator begins with his own story, but soon he is encompassing the lives and memories of both historical and fictional characters. Primo Levy makes an appearance, as does Franz Kafka. What they all have in common is having endured suffering and loss.
Sometimes the narrator addresses himself, sometimes he takes on another's identity to see better through his or her eyes. "YOU ARE," he says late in the novel, "ANYONE AND NO ONE, the person you invent or remember and the person others invent or remember."
Fiction, history and memoir thus blend together over time and space. The novel is structured in a series of chapters, each of which deals with either the narrator or another character. The Holocaust is a major theme, as are the Stalinist purges and the Separdic diaspora, the expulsion of the Jews from Spain by Ferdinand and Isabella.
At times, especially in the beginning, it's hard to keep track of the different speakers, but gradually the methodology becomes clear and the different narratives come together in the narrator's voice to form an effective and very moving whole. Ultimately, then, this is a lyrical, questioning, anguished novel that suggests that any attempt to pay homage to the suffering of the dead is only temporarily successful.

23 of 23 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Profound Achievement, May 18, 2004

By 

K. Donow "Ken Donow" (Silver Spring, MD United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Sepharad (Hardcover)

I've never read anything quite like Sepharad. I thought a bit about W.G. Sebald's work while reading this wonderful book, however, Munoz Molina -- or his exceptional translator -- is more of a poet. The stories that comprise this novel are all about displacement -- enforced and circumstantial -- in a way that is clearly unique to post-WW II Europe. They are stories of wandering while standing still. I was very moved by the book and intend to recommend it to all of the intelligent readers in my world.

19 of 21 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars We Are of a Time and Place, March 7, 2004

By A Customer

This review is from: Sepharad (Hardcover)

Sepharad is a collection of chapters that make us question who we are in this time and this place. The poetic lyricism of the language is mesmerizing, pulling us back and forth from the 1940s to the present day, to the 1600s, to the early 20th Century. We jump from Spain, to New York, to Russia, to Paris following the Jewish diaspora over the centuries. There is no timeline to restrict us.

We are reminded of Kafka's Metamorphosis in which Gregor wakes up one morning as a giant bug; not the same being as the day before. We are reminded of Kafka's Trial in which the accused is never informed of his crime, other than the crime of being born. Are we the same person today as yesterday or the one we will be tomorrow?

My only regret is that I cannot read this book in the original Spanish. The translation is sheer poetry; the original must be a song.