On page 140, the author appears to describe a vision for this book:"For two or three years I have flirted with the idea of writing a novel, imagined situations and places, like snapshots, or like those posters displayed on large billboards at the entrance to a movie theater. That these stills were never in narrative sequence made them all the more powerful, freed them of the weight and vulgar conventions of a scenario; they were revelations in the present, with no before or after. When I didn't have the money to go inside, I would spend hours looking at the photographs outside the theater, not needing to invent a story to fit them together like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. Each became a mystery, illuminating the others, creating multiple links that I could break or modify at my whim, patterns in which no image nullified the others or gained precedence or lost its uniqueness within the whole."Here, it is as if Muñoz Molina is describing not only his journey, but mine; or, as if he is describing what living is like for many of us. The journey is our life. From pages 153/154:"Days before leaving, my life had already been turned by the magnet of my journey, pulled toward the hour of departure, which approached with agonizing slowness. I was still here yet distant, though no one noticed my absence, not from the places I lived and worked, not from the things that were extensions of myself and indicated my existence, my immobilized life, confined to a single city, to a few streets…."Never was I so obsessed with impossible journeys as then, so distanced from myself and from the tangible and real around me. It wasn't that an important part of me was hidden from others' eyes; my whole self was hidden. The shell that others saw didn't matter at all, it had nothing to do with me. … With literary vanity, I sought refuge in being unknown, hidden, but there was a conformity in me at least as strong as my rebellion, with the difference that the conformity was practical while the rebellion showed only occasionally as a blurry discontent…""There were two worlds, one visible and the other invisible, and I adapted tamely to the norms of the first so I could retreat without too much inconvenience into the second."My thoughts upon completion:This book didn’t make me want to pick it up between readings. But why should it be the book’s responsibility to make me? It was I who needed this book, and not the other way around. And as I took my time, for weeks, reading it, I was unable to forget that need of mine. I could not find a desire to read anything else between my short sessions with Muñoz Molina’s journey in this novel. And, with each paragraph, each chapter, each page, I was filled up with his poetry of thought and his longing for memory. There was no other way for me to read this book.His journey is a long one. His memories and reflections, his connections between one train, one place, one tense and another take time. I was surprised each time I picked it up that this book is a light 385 pages, when his travels between the book’s covers are so weighty. The traveling between past and present, between history and personal memoir, between what appears to be fiction and is known to be nonfiction, goes so very deep and so very far. After finally finishing it, I know I am still there, in those pages, almost nauseous from the whirlwind of the author’s processing. I am relieved to be done, yet I know I have to read the book again. His words and reflections resonate with an ancestral me. I have never been to Spain, though my maternal ancestors were emigrants from there. As far as I know, I have no Jewish ancestors. But over the course of my reading I ponder more and more how impossible it seems that we are not each to some degree related within the diaspora of the human soul.As I read this I found that almost instantly – if I was not terribly distracted, and even when I was – I was drawn in as if by an old friend who by chance meets me on a street in some gray city of my past, and with an arm around my shoulders walks with me and picks up a tale he has been telling me for years. I was captured, almost against my will, and yet mesmerized, flattered and transfixed by the tale and the intimacy of the encounter. I would go into a trance.It occurred to me fleetingly that the book I insist on writing is no longer necessary now that I have read Sepharad. It is not my book, but the journey I have taken with the author in his book has been exhaustive. And though my own memories and history are different in the details, his writing on the displacement and isolation of those whose home is lost, is not so different from what I would wish to write about, having never had a home at heart. It has made me wonder at the displacement of an individual's soul, and how the history of exile and cruelty and shadow still shines a dim beacon for all of us who might know what it means to be alienated from our own past and future.
Sepharad doesn’t really have a plot. It’s more like a series of essays on a theme. The theme, as I can best sum it up, is Diaspora. Molina focuses on the displacement of Spanish people during World War II and the Cold War. He weaves together stories of unknown citizens with those of famous authors who were affected by some of the traumatic events that occurred in 20th century Europe. He is constantly coming back to his theme and asking the reader, “How would you feel if you had to leave your home forever, if you had to live in fear of the police, if you felt different and cut off from everyone around you?” Molina makes a valiant attempt to put the reader in the shoes of his subjects and capture the emotion of unimaginable tragedies.The issue that I had with the book was its lack of structure. It is presented somewhat as a of stream-of-consciousness. Molina’s skill as a storyteller kept me mostly engaged, but at times I found my attention wandering. Sometimes I would get 10 or 20 pages into a chapter and realize I had no idea what the point of the story was, who the characters were or what was happening. The chapters aren’t very long so usually I could just muddle through until the next one. All of his stories relate to a central theme so even when they didn’t make sense I could still get a feeling for their relation to the novel. The book is a journey into the author’s head. The way he keeps returning to certain thoughts, characters and sentences mimics the way many people’s minds work. It keeps running through the same scenarios and problems over and over again. It’s always interesting to crawl inside someone’s psyche and see the world from a new perspective. I’m grateful to Molina for making the effort to bring readers into his mind.
What do You think about Sepharad (2006)?
I tried. If I had a shelf for, is-it-just-me-or-does-the-emperor-have-no-clothes, this would be on it. It got great reviews from all the snobby publications, and I simply couldn't make heads or tails of it. I didn't get any sense of a novel, and I never quite learned who the narrator (narrators?) was. It felt like each chapter was meant to be its own short story, but within each of those, several different tales were being told in an almost stream-of-consciousness way. One minute we're Catholic Spaniards, the next minute we're Holocaust victims/refugees in various eastern European locations, etc. Maybe I should have given this more of a chance, but I had trouble giving it even the 50 pages I feel I owe any given book before deciding to discard it.
—K
"Without your knowledge, other people usurp stories or fragments from your life, episodes you think you've kept in a sealed chamber of your memory and yet are told by people you may not even know, people who have heard them and repeat them, modify them, adapt them according to their whim or how carefully they listened, or for certain comic or slanderous effect. Somewhere, right this minute, someone is telling something very personal about me, something he witnessed years ago but that I probably don't even remember, and since I don't remember I assume it doesn't exist for anyone, erased from the world as completely as from my mind. Bits and pieces of you are left behind in other lives, rooms you lived in that others now occupy, photographs or keepsakes or books that belonged to you and now someone you don't know is touching and looking at, letters still in existence when the person who wrote them adn the person who received them and kept them for a long, long time are dead. Far from you, scenes from your life are relived, and in them you're a fiction, a secondary character in a book, a passerby in the film or novel of another person's life."
—Alexander Veee
Esta novela es la historia del viaje del autor desde su Úbeda natal a un concepto de España múchisimo más amplio en tiempo y espacio : en tiempo, desde 1492 y la expulsión de los judíos hasta nuestros días, y en el espacio, desde Úbeda hasta todos los países y todas las ciudades donde hay o han habido gente que conservaba una llave, unas canciones, un apellido o algún otro recuerdo de ese país de que fueron expulsados sus ancestros y que ellos llamaban "Sefarad". Cada capítulo es otra aventura, de manera que el libro parece más una colección de reflexiones y relatos que una novela, donde esperamos seguir el hilo de un protagonista determinado y no las historias de decenas de personas en diferentes épocas y lugares. Pero entonces, después de varias historias aparentemente inconexas, el lector vuelve a encontrar algunos de los mismos personajes que había visto en alguno de los capítulos anteriores, y poco a poco entra en un entramado cada vez más denso. En el curso de este viaje literario, físico y emocional, llegamos a conocer o por lo menos ver veintenas de personas reales, algunas famosas y otras de nombres perdidos con el tiempo, cada uno con algo diferente y muy especial para enseñarnos sobre el siglo pasado, y los anteriores. Muñoz Molina es a la vez explorador y guía, y muy buena compañia en este viaje.
—Geoffrey Fox
