Customer Reviews

Sepharad

5 star:		(7)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

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.

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.

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.

From everything I had read about this book, it was a novel relating how jews who had been expelled from Spain in 1492 (the Sefardim) faired during the second world war and were affected by the Shoah. Though there are two stories about people going to Auschwitz and one about going to the Gulag (and the comparison of how little difference between Hitler and Stalin), most of the stories relate to a man who used to live in a small town in central Spain, and some people he knew or made up to be from there.

Though this is not a novel, it is more of a pastiche of stories that have some interconnections and people between them. More than anything else, this is the story of exile, and how people don't leave who they are when they move to another country. People may always be looking to go somewhere that they think is better, but they never lose their love for the place the came from. This is especially true for people who have been driven out from their homes, so that the Spanish Republicans who crossed over to France, have the same memories and dreams as the Jews who were exiled by Ferdinand III in 1492.

The stories (each chapter can be read independently) are all about the strength in people that they don't realize they have. People find the strength to go on after being exiled, or shipped off to a concentration camp. The memory of lives lived and those not lived still stir peoples emotions even fifty years after the time when decisions are made.

The translator should be congratulated for the way she was able to keep the tone of the stories and the ambiance of the words.

Munoz Molina has crafted an utterly brilliant novel that weaves a number of different stories together into a tapestry both sad beyond words and strangely uplifting. His work evoked memories of Solzhenitsyn's finest passages about life in Satlin's camps. Munoz Molina demonstrates how the human spirit can rise above degredation and despair to find dignity and hope. A wonderful achievement.

Sepharad, the modern Hebrew for Spain, is unlike any other book I have ever read. And, it is extraordinary. Munoz Molina, a highly respected, award-winning Spanish writer, has written a novel comprising 17 short novellas; each stands on its own and, yet, there are interwoven themes and characters throughout. The book is told in a variety of narrative voices; sometimes it is Molina himself -- the writer writing about the writing of this book -- and sometimes it is an unknown voice telling a story to another person. Part of the thrill of reading this book is in anticipating and then figuring out who is telling the story contained within a particular chapter.

What is the book about? Well, let's see. Not an easy question to answer. As the title suggests, it is a book about Spain's Jewish diaspora of 1492 and what has resulted in response to that exile. It is about displacement and a sense of otherness. It is also about the Holocaust. It is about Stalin and the systematic purges of the Russian population. In short, it is about history and the effects of exile. The characters are both fictional and drawn from real life; Primo Levi, Jean Amery, Leon Trotsky, Franz Kafka, Eugenia Ginsburg all make appearances in Molina's astounding book.

This is not an easy book to read. You will not pick it up and think to yourself, 40 pages in, Oh, I get it now; i see where the plot is going. In some ways, there is no plot. Or perhaps more to the point, the narrative arc is one of complex, winding paths circling an end point rather than a straight line heading towards a destination. But, if you're prepared to do some thinking and to work hard at your reading, you will be rewarded BIG TIME. There is so much here. So many deep and fascinating thoughts.

I have to be honest. This is not a book for everyone. You have to be a dedicated reader and you have to work hard. You will DEFINITELY be rewarded. The words and thoughts will stay with you long after you have regretfully finished the final amazing chapter.

I began this book knowing very little about it, and almost nothing about its author. I then discovered that it was a compendium of tales about real people who lived during the Holocaust and the Stalinist purges. I have read quite a lot of Holocaust literature, the past few years (Most nonfiction). But this book blended two of my favorite types of reading matter: memoir and short stories.

I found the structure very unusual: the characters tell their versions of events, and it's not always clear which character is speaking, at any given point. But this method, far from making me impatient, actually made it easier for me to surrender to the dream-like power of the narrative.

This was my first Muñoz Molina. His sentences are like no other (well, OK, they did remind me -- vaguely -- of Gabriel Garcia Marquez). They begin in one place and take you effortlessly into another. I was surprised, but always completely delighted.

A tale told by a handsome cobbler, towards the end of the book, is an absolute gem. I kept thinking that if this were a stand-alone short story, it would rival any by Borges. It is delirious, wicked, and at the same time completely rooted in reality.

I loved this book.

"Sepharad" is an extraordinary accomplishment. It is touching and saddening to read so many beautifully rendered sketches of acute persecution leading to personal loss. Lots of the power of the book for me came from the difficulty at times to tell what was fact from what was fiction. That lots of it was fact is heartbreaking and that part which is fiction is often devastatingly beautiful.

Yet for all its power at the end I was a bit tired. The final two stories in particular I frankly skimmed thru. The pattern of reminiscence about personal loss became repetitive, almost formulaic. The book could well have ended 50 pages earlier, at least for me.

Such "quibbling" aside, it is impossible not to be deeply moved by "Sepharad". I look forward to more from Molina.

This volume is a tour-de-force, a multilayered novel that grapples with the themes of love, exile, and estrangement without once slipping into sentimentality. The dizzying series of vignettes--the Hungarian Jew in Tangiers, the lonely provincial clerk in an unnamed Spanish town, Munzenberg's harrowing flight from his erstwhile Stalinist allies, Jean Amery's terrible hours inside a Gestapo torture chamber--enable the patient reader (this book is no "thriller") to better understand one of the 20th century's most harrowing motifs: exile. And it is this theme, ultimately, that not only provides the scaffolding for all of Molina's stories, but also establishes the link between the extermination of Europe's Jews and the 1492 Spanish Expulsion.

If I had to point to the novel's flaws, I would say that several characters are somewhat stereotypical: the Spanish officer in the marauding German Army who falls in love with the hounded Jewish woman is a bit trite, as are the descriptions of the shopkeeper's attempts to "deflower" the cloistered nun. These are forgivable lapses, however, and do not diminish the originality of this beautiful novel.

Sepharad is a thoughtful and poignant embodiment of the consequences of totalitarianism in various forms in 20th century Europe, of the exile from roots and from the self that totaiatrinism creates, and of exile in general. Technically it is remarkable for fluid changes of point of view. In the same page a character may be called he, ("He watched us from his balcony", I, ("I returned to my balcony...") and you ("You look down form your balcony on the family across the street.") - all so smoothly I hardly noticed it. This technique echoes the theme of the vulnerability of identity