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Antonio Muñoz Molina (b. 1956) |
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Spanish novelist, short story writer, and essayist, whose stories employ a wide variety of narrative strategies. In novels such as El invierno en Lisboa (1987), Beltenebros (1989), and El jinete polaco (1991), Antonio Muñoz Molina has reevaluated Spain's recent history, the Civil War, and the decades of dictatorship under Generalísimo Francisco Franco. "Sometimes in the course of a journey you hear and tell stories of other journeys. It seems that with the act of departing the memory of previous travels becomes more vivid, and also that you listen more closely and better appreciate the stories you're told: a parenthesis of meaningful words within the other, temporal, parenthesis of the journey. Anyone who travels can surround himself with a silence that will be mysterious to strangers observating him, or he can yield, with no fear of he consequences, to the temptation of shading the truth, of gliding an episode of his life as he tells it to someone he will never see again." (Sepharad by Antonio Muñoz Molina, translated from the Spanish by Margaret Sayers Peden, Orlando: Harvest Books, 2008, p. 22; first published by Alfaguara as Sefarad: una novela de novelas in 2001) Antonio Muñoz Molina was born in the southern provincial city of Úbeda in Jaén. His parents Muñoz Molina has once described as members of "an unlucky generation." At the age of eight, his father had dropped out of school to help with the family's small farm. Muñoz Molina's mother never had the opportunity for any education in her childhood. "My grandfather's farm could be better called a vegetable and fruit orchard, one of the many fertile huertas which surrounded the outskirts of town, irrigated by a centuries old system of reservoir and ditches dating from the times of the Arabic civilization in Spain." ('Memories of a Distant War,' The Volunteer, Vol. XXVII, No. 4, December, 2005) Muñoz
Molina was the first of his family to obtain a formal
education. His primary education he received at a Jesuit school. At
about the age of eleven or twelve, he started reading works by Jules
Verne, Mark Twain, R. L. Stevenson, Agatha Christie, and Alexandre
Dumas. He studied journalism in Madrid and then art history at the
University of Granada, where he lived between 1974 and 1991. While in
Madrid, he took part in a demonstration and was arrested. Many of his
friends active in the underground Communist Party. Until
1988, Muñoz Molina worked in Granada as a municipal employee. Since
1995, he has been a full member of the Royal Spanish Academy. Muñoz Molina began writing in the 1980s, publishing his first
articles in the Diario de Granada. Later they were collected in
El Robinson Urbano (1984) and Diario del Nautilus
(1986). Muñoz Molina has also written articles for such major
newspapers as El País, ABC, and Die Welt. His
first novel, Beatus Ille (1986, A Manuscript of Ashes),
received the Icaro Prize. Muñoz Molina started Beatus Ille
after Franco's death, but it took ten years before the work was
completed. Superficially a detective story, it tells of the attempts of
a young college student, Minaya, to reveal the murderer of his uncle's
wife in 1937, during the Civil War. However, there is also another
mystery, the identity of the narrator, Jacinto Solana, who turns out to
be a supposedly
dead, forgotten poet of the Generation of 1927. Unlike in the work of
authors like Eduardo Mendoza, who has also exploited the conventions of
the detective novel, Muñoz Molina's focus is on existential and moral
issues, not political or social criticism. Bertrand de Muñoz has argued
that Muñoz Molina "transforms the Civil War of 1936 into a myth, frees
it from ideologies and makes it possible for art to flourish." (The Persistence of Memory: The Spanish Civil War in Contemporary Spanish Narrative by Matthew John O‘Neill, University of California, Riverside, 2011, p. 38) The title of the novel is a quote from Horace: "Beatus ille, qui procul negotiis, / ut prisca gens mortalium, / paterna rura bubus exercet suis" (A man is blessed who, free from any business deals, / As were the mortal race of old, / With his own oxen works among ancestral fields).Muñoz Molina uses it ironically: Jacinto Solana is dissatisfied with agricultural life and tries to escape to the city. ('Literature and the Dictatorship. Historiographic Metafiction in Antonio Muñoz Molina's A Manuscript of Ashes' by Katarzyna Barbara Parys, Institute of Iberian and Ibero-American Studies, University of Warsaw, 2017, p. 111; https://www.researchgate.net/. Accessed 1 July 2025) El invierno en Lisboa (Winter in Lisbon), which was awarded the 1988 Premio de la Crítica, and the Premio Nacional de Narrativa, was made into a stylishly photographed film by the director José A. Zorrilla in 1991, starring Christian Vadim, Hélène de Saint-Père, Dizzy Gillespie, and Eusebio Poncela. El invierno en Lisboa has been called "the quintessential Spanish novel of the 1980s. Not other novel of this decade, and no other novel by Muñoz Molina, has received more scholarly attention." (The Discourse of Flanerie in Antonio Muñoz Molina's Texts by Richard Sperber, Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 2015, p. 45) The episodic story, filled with the atmosphere of a film noir, revolves around a jazz pianist, Santiago Biralbo, whose life is turned upside down by an art smuggler called Malcolm. In an interview Muñoz Molina has acknowledged, that the anonymous narrator, Biralbo's friend, was modeled after the narrator in Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby. Muñoz Molina's third novel, Beltenebros (Prince of
Shadows),
set in Madrid in the 1960s and constructed as a spy thriller, inspired
Pilar Miró's film of the same title, starring Terence Stamp, Patsy
Kensit, José Luis Gómez, and Geraldine James. The novel was partly
inspired by factual events, the assassination of Gabriel León Trilla,
one of the founders of the Spanish Communist party. The narrator,
Darman, is an executioner, who is called to Madrid to "eliminate" a man
he has never met, Andrade, a presumed security risk. While on his
mission in the world of shadows, Darman recalls events in the 1940s,
when he executed another presumed traitor. El jinete polaco, in which Muñoz Molina retuns to his fictional town of Mágina created in Beatus Ille, was awarded the prestigious Planeta Prize and the Premio Nacional de Narrativa. Mágina, a re-creation of the author's Andalusian birthplace, is a city where history has been forgotten. This imaginary setting has been compared to Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha and García Márquez's Macondo. Like Don
Quijote, the protagonist of El jineto polaco,
Manuel, sets out on an existential journey; he leaves Mágina to escape
from the dreary prospects of his life. With his lover Nadia, they try
to make sense
of their lives in a rented New York apartment. The past is present
through memory and a chest full of photographs, given them by Ramiro,
the Mágina photographer. In his speech accepting the Planeta Prize
Muñoz Molina said, that "this is what I have been trying to do for
years, to tell the story of memory and desire". Both Beatus Ille
and El jineto polaco
portray protagonists, who have been too young to witness the civil war,
but its tragic events have had an impact on their minds. A central theme in Muñoz Molina's work is that to know the past is to understand the present. The memoir-history Sefarad (Sepharad), which maps the mental changes of the 20th-century Europe, took its title from the Hebrew word for the biblical Sepharad (Spain). "Unconscious memory is the yeast of imagination." (Ibid., p. 32) A kind of reference book on refugees, Sefarad consists of 17 seemingly separate tales portraying fictional and true-life characters – Primo Levi, Franz Kafka, Walter Benjamin, Victor Klemperer, Yevgenia Ginzburg, and others – and their occasionally intertwining paths. "Muñoz Molina quotes everyone and everything", said Michael Pyn in his review. "When there's a story without sources, ''Sepharad'' is like a memoir." ('I'm a Stranger Here Myself,' The New York Times, December 21, 2003) The connecting link between the characters is the experience of homelessness and exile, in one or another way, metaphorically referring to the expulsion of the Jews from Spain and Portugal in the 15th century. The exile theme was also present in La noche de los tiempos (2009, In the Night of Time). The Spanish Civil war provides the background for the story of conflicting loyalties, memories and the passing of time. An unknown narrator observes Ignacio Abel, the protagonist: "I see him first at a distance in the rush-hour crowd, a male figure identical to all the others, as in a photograph of the time, dwarfed by the immense scale of the architecture: light topcoats, raincoats, hats . . . " (translated from the Spanish by Edith Grossman, Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2013, p. 1) He is an architecht, who must choose between his personal desires and dreams to fight for a greater cause. Like in many of Muñoz Molina's novels, reality and the imaginaire are intertwined in Como la sombra que se va (2014, Like a Fading Shadow); his fiction is intentionally misleading. However, he has said that he is not interested in "postmodern games" but more devoted to understanding reality rather than to affirming its uncertainty. (Derivative Lives: Biofiction, Uncertainty, and Speculative Risk in Contemporary Spanish Narrative by Virginia Newhall Rademacher, New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2022, p. 44) The exact facts Muñoz Molina present do not clarify what actually has happened. One storyline – often surreal – reconstructs James Earl Ray's 10-day visit to Lisbon, after he had assassinated Martin Luther King Jr. and then fled from authorities. Another is a fictionalized autobiography taking place on different time levels, mostly in 1987, when the young Muñoz Molina was writing his first novel. "The Lisbon that belonged to the real world was being distilled into an abstract city, a model made to the dimensions of the plot unfolding within it, like the sets of Rimini or Rome built by Fellini in Cinecittà, or the gloomy New York of black-and-white thrillers filmed in Hollywood. The anonymous narrator had never been to Lisbon, so this was an imaginary city." (Ibid., translated from the Spanish by Camilo A. Ramirez, New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2017, p. 164) Andar solitario entre la gente (2018, To Walk Alone in the Crowd) opens with the lines: "Listen to the sounds of life. I am all ears. I listen with my eyes. I hear what I see on advertisements, headlines, posters, signs. I move through a city of voices and words." (translated from the Spanish by Guillermo Bleichmar, New York: Picador, 2022, p. 3) The narrator wanders in New York and Madrid, recording the noises of the urban environment. He is not totally alone, but walks with a backpack filled with a lot of names: Christopher Isherwood, Bosch, Carmen Calvo, and Ramón Gómez de la Sernaare mentioned just in the first page. Muñoz Molina's work was awarded France's 2020 Medici Prize for Foreign Novel. In 1991 Muñoz Molina was appointed member of the Real Academia Española de la Lengua. From 2004 to 2006 he served as Director of the Instituto Cervantes in New York City. In 2007 Muñoz Molina received an honorary doctorate from the University of Jaén. Muñoz Molina is married to the Spanish journalist, writer and actress Elvira Lindo. They co-wrote the screenplay for the film Plenilunio (1999), based on Muñoz Molina's novel of the same title. Although Muñoz Molina has acknowledged the influence of Jorge Luis Borges, William Faulkner, Juan Carlos Onetti, Julio Cortázar and Mario Vargas Llosa, his work is deeply rooted in the European historical experience. At home while writing he listens to classical music and jazz. His favorites include Bach, Debussy, Jean Sibelius, Shostakovich, and the jazz trumpeter and composer Dizzy Gillespie. Note: This article is under construction. (July 2, 2023) For further reading: La narrativa elocuente de Antonio Muñoz Molina, edited by Francisco Morales Lomas (2022); Derivative Lives: Biofiction, Uncertainty, and Speculative Risk in Contemporary Spanish Narrative by Virginia Newhall Rademacher (2022); Diez horas con Antonio Muñoz Molina, una conversación con Jesús Ruiz Mantilla (2022); The Discourse of Flanerie in Antonio Muñoz Molina's Texts by Richard Sperber (2015); Antonio Muñoz Molina: la letra pequeña by Justo Serna (2015); Antonio Muñoz Molina: el tiempo en nuestras manos by Justo Serna (2014); El medio fotográfico en la narrativa de Antonio Muñoz Molina by María Luisa Fernández Martínez (2014); Antonio Muñoz Molina: el Robinson en Nueva York by Manuel Ruiz Rico (2011); 'The Shadow of Don Quijote in the Narrative of Antonio Muñoz Molina' by David K. Herzberger, in Tradition and Modernity: Cervantes's Presence in Spanish Contemporary Literature, edited by Idoya Puig (2009); The Gaze on the Past by Olga López-Valero Colbert (2007); Traces of Contamination: Unearthing the Francoist Legacy in Contemporary Spanish Discourse, edited by Eloy E. Merino and H. Rosi Song (2005); The Narrative of Antonio Munoz Molina by Lawrence Rich (1999); The Use of Film in Postmodern Fiction of Peter Handke, Robert Coover, Carlos Fuentes, and Antonio Munoz Molina by Ana Carlota Larrea (1991) Selected works:
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