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Like a Fading Shadow
A hypnotic novel intertwining the author's past with James Earl Ray's attempt to escape after shooting Martin Luther King Jr.
The year is 1968 and James Earl Ray has just shot Martin Luther King Jr. For two months he evades authorities, driving to Canada, securing a fake passport, and flying to London, all while relishing the media's confusion about his location and his image on the FBI's Most Wanted list. Eventually he lands at the Hotel Portugal in Lisbon, where he anxiously awaits a visa to Angola. But the visa never comes, and for his last ten days of freedom, Ray walks around Lisbon, paying for his pleasures and rehearsing his fake identities.
Using recently declassified FBI files, Antonio Munoz Molina reconstructs Ray's final steps through the Portuguese capital, taking us inside his feverish mind, troubled past, and infamous crime. But Lisbon is also the city that inspired Munoz Molina's first novel, A Winter in Lisbon, and as he returns now, thirty years later, it becomes the stage for and witness to three alternating stories: Ray in 1968 at the center of an international manhunt; a thirty-year-old Munoz Molina in 1987 struggling to find his literary voice; and the author in the present, reflecting on his life and the form of the novel as an instrument for imagining the world through another person's eyes.
Part historical fiction, part fictional memoir, Like a Fading Shadow masterfully explores the borders between the imagined, the reported, and the experienced past in the construction of identity.
The year is 1968 and James Earl Ray has just shot Martin Luther King Jr. For two months he evades authorities, driving to Canada, securing a fake passport, and flying to London, all while relishing the media's confusion about his location and his image on the FBI's Most Wanted list. Eventually he lands at the Hotel Portugal in Lisbon, where he anxiously awaits a visa to Angola. But the visa never comes, and for his last ten days of freedom, Ray walks around Lisbon, paying for his pleasures and rehearsing his fake identities.
Using recently declassified FBI files, Antonio Munoz Molina reconstructs Ray's final steps through the Portuguese capital, taking us inside his feverish mind, troubled past, and infamous crime. But Lisbon is also the city that inspired Munoz Molina's first novel, A Winter in Lisbon, and as he returns now, thirty years later, it becomes the stage for and witness to three alternating stories: Ray in 1968 at the center of an international manhunt; a thirty-year-old Munoz Molina in 1987 struggling to find his literary voice; and the author in the present, reflecting on his life and the form of the novel as an instrument for imagining the world through another person's eyes.
Part historical fiction, part fictional memoir, Like a Fading Shadow masterfully explores the borders between the imagined, the reported, and the experienced past in the construction of identity.
321 pages, Kindle Edition
First published November 22, 2014
About the author
Antonio Muñoz Molina
126 books515 followersAntonio Muñoz Molina is a Spanish writer and, since 8 June 1995, a full member of the Royal Spanish Academy. He currently resides in New York City, United States. In 2004-2005 he served as the director of the Instituto Cervantes of New York.
He was born in the town of Úbeda in Jaén province.
He studied art history at the University of Granada and journalism in Madrid. He began writing in the 1980s and his first published book, El Robinsón urbano, a collection of his journalistic work, was published in 1984. His columns have regularly appeared in El País and Die Welt.
His first novel, Beatus ille, appeared in 1986. It features the imaginary city of Mágina — a re-creation of his Andalusian birthplace — which would reappear in some his later works.
In 1987 Muñoz Molina was awarded Spain's National Narrative Prize for El invierno en Lisboa (translated as Winter in Lisbon), a homage to the genres of film noir and jazz music. His El jinete polaco received the Planeta Prize in 1991 and, again, the National Narrative Prize in 1992.
His other novels include Beltenebros (1989), a story of love and political intrigue in post-Civil War Madrid, Los misterios de Madrid (1992), and El dueño del secreto (1994).
Margaret Sayers Peden's English-language translation of Muñoz Molina's novel Sepharad won the PEN/Book-of-the-Month Club Translation Prize in 2004. He won the Jerusalem Prize in 2013.
He is married to Spanish author and journalist, Elvira Lindo.
He was born in the town of Úbeda in Jaén province.
He studied art history at the University of Granada and journalism in Madrid. He began writing in the 1980s and his first published book, El Robinsón urbano, a collection of his journalistic work, was published in 1984. His columns have regularly appeared in El País and Die Welt.
His first novel, Beatus ille, appeared in 1986. It features the imaginary city of Mágina — a re-creation of his Andalusian birthplace — which would reappear in some his later works.
In 1987 Muñoz Molina was awarded Spain's National Narrative Prize for El invierno en Lisboa (translated as Winter in Lisbon), a homage to the genres of film noir and jazz music. His El jinete polaco received the Planeta Prize in 1991 and, again, the National Narrative Prize in 1992.
His other novels include Beltenebros (1989), a story of love and political intrigue in post-Civil War Madrid, Los misterios de Madrid (1992), and El dueño del secreto (1994).
Margaret Sayers Peden's English-language translation of Muñoz Molina's novel Sepharad won the PEN/Book-of-the-Month Club Translation Prize in 2004. He won the Jerusalem Prize in 2013.
He is married to Spanish author and journalist, Elvira Lindo.
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November 29, 2020
This metafictional novel is part memoir of the author, part biography of James Earl Ray, who assassinated Martin Luther King Jr. in 1968. Muñoz Molina takes a naturalist approach and fills his account with facts and details, while also giving the text a postmodern touch by ripping it apart and reconstructing it as a montage: There are his story and that of Ray, both posing intertwining narrative threads, there is Muñoz Molina writing Ray's story and meditating about the creative process, and there are numerous time jumps that go back and forth. Still, the story is very easy to follow if you are willing to go along with Muñoz Molina and trust his ability to always lead you back to the main storylines (which he will do).
To assess the content, or at least some of it, let's start with the narrative pieces that can be read as Muñoz Molina's memoir: As a young man and a married father of two, he held a government Job in Granada that he hated and dreamt of becoming a writer. He felt unhappy, trapped in his marriage and his life as a whole. In 1987, he decided to travel to Lisbon to further work on his first novel (my research suggests that this novel was "Winter in Lisbon", in which jazz music plays an important role - just as in "Like a Fading Shadow"). And this brings us to James Earl Ray: After killing Martin Luther King, Ray was on the run for about two months before being arrested at Heathrow airport. He he had flown in from Lisbon, where he had been hiding for some time (just like Muñoz Molina). In the course of the novel, we learn a lot more about both protagonists and Muñoz Molina finds unexpected ways to combine their narrative threads.
Now you will probably say: That connection between Muñoz Molina and Ray sounds pretty far-fetched and construed. And it is. But I feel like that is Muñoz Molina's point: Their connection exists because he wills it into existence, which is the power of literature. Ray had a terrible upbringing, he was obsessed with spy novels (just like Muñoz Molina at some point) and tried to force his imagined persona to come into existence - in prison, he even wrote books himself, putting part of the blame for his crime on a mysterious guy named Raoul, for whose existence there has never been any proof. Now Muñoz Molina steps onto the scene, re-imagining Ray and his younger self in this book, trying to capture the stories of one fugitive on the run from a crime and of another fugitive on the run from his life, and to assess the fleeting quality of time itself. It is like a house of mirrors, full of interrelations and references that are only there because Muñoz Molina plants them, not because there would be any natural connection.
The effect is particularly puzzling because Muñoz Molina works with so many facts and details, sometimes in tedious excess. The fictional quality comes with the montage and the framing. The word "shadow" features 41 times in the book, referring to the concept of a looming past that might have happened or not ("invisible": 21 times; "disappear": 29 times - you get the idea).
"Before thoughts can fully form, the secret novelist inside us all is already plotting stories", Muñoz Molina writes, and later in the text, he states that "(t)he highest aspiration of literature is not to improve an amorphous matter of real events through fiction, but to imitate the unpremediated, yet rigorous, order of reality, to create a scale model of its forms and processes". The novel is intersperserd with such thoughts about the text, which underlines that one major theme of the book is literature itself.
So this book obviously has a lot of literary merit, it is intelligent and challenging, and I feel a little silly to now add why I didn't award it with more stars: I did not thoroughly enjoy it,and I wasn't immersed in the story. I don't want to blame Muñoz Molina for it, but while I saw how smart and accomplished this text is, I did not feel this magic urge to keep on reading, I wasn't mesmerized or particularly invested. I almost feel like I should apologize for it, because Muñoz Molina is so gifted. This is probably simply not the ideal kind of literature for me.
If you want to learn more about Muñoz Molina, I found a wonderful text from the Instituto Cervantes about his writing technique - it is in Spanish, but very easy to understand: https://cvc.cervantes.es/literatura/a...
To assess the content, or at least some of it, let's start with the narrative pieces that can be read as Muñoz Molina's memoir: As a young man and a married father of two, he held a government Job in Granada that he hated and dreamt of becoming a writer. He felt unhappy, trapped in his marriage and his life as a whole. In 1987, he decided to travel to Lisbon to further work on his first novel (my research suggests that this novel was "Winter in Lisbon", in which jazz music plays an important role - just as in "Like a Fading Shadow"). And this brings us to James Earl Ray: After killing Martin Luther King, Ray was on the run for about two months before being arrested at Heathrow airport. He he had flown in from Lisbon, where he had been hiding for some time (just like Muñoz Molina). In the course of the novel, we learn a lot more about both protagonists and Muñoz Molina finds unexpected ways to combine their narrative threads.
Now you will probably say: That connection between Muñoz Molina and Ray sounds pretty far-fetched and construed. And it is. But I feel like that is Muñoz Molina's point: Their connection exists because he wills it into existence, which is the power of literature. Ray had a terrible upbringing, he was obsessed with spy novels (just like Muñoz Molina at some point) and tried to force his imagined persona to come into existence - in prison, he even wrote books himself, putting part of the blame for his crime on a mysterious guy named Raoul, for whose existence there has never been any proof. Now Muñoz Molina steps onto the scene, re-imagining Ray and his younger self in this book, trying to capture the stories of one fugitive on the run from a crime and of another fugitive on the run from his life, and to assess the fleeting quality of time itself. It is like a house of mirrors, full of interrelations and references that are only there because Muñoz Molina plants them, not because there would be any natural connection.
The effect is particularly puzzling because Muñoz Molina works with so many facts and details, sometimes in tedious excess. The fictional quality comes with the montage and the framing. The word "shadow" features 41 times in the book, referring to the concept of a looming past that might have happened or not ("invisible": 21 times; "disappear": 29 times - you get the idea).
"Before thoughts can fully form, the secret novelist inside us all is already plotting stories", Muñoz Molina writes, and later in the text, he states that "(t)he highest aspiration of literature is not to improve an amorphous matter of real events through fiction, but to imitate the unpremediated, yet rigorous, order of reality, to create a scale model of its forms and processes". The novel is intersperserd with such thoughts about the text, which underlines that one major theme of the book is literature itself.
So this book obviously has a lot of literary merit, it is intelligent and challenging, and I feel a little silly to now add why I didn't award it with more stars: I did not thoroughly enjoy it,and I wasn't immersed in the story. I don't want to blame Muñoz Molina for it, but while I saw how smart and accomplished this text is, I did not feel this magic urge to keep on reading, I wasn't mesmerized or particularly invested. I almost feel like I should apologize for it, because Muñoz Molina is so gifted. This is probably simply not the ideal kind of literature for me.
If you want to learn more about Muñoz Molina, I found a wonderful text from the Instituto Cervantes about his writing technique - it is in Spanish, but very easy to understand: https://cvc.cervantes.es/literatura/a...
April 13, 2018
Shortlisted for the Man Booker International. Worthwhile, but far from Muñoz Molina's best - read Sepharad - and there were better books on the longlist.
To write fiction is to see the world through the eyes of another person, to hear it through somebody else’s ears. It is the audacity to believe you can know the secrets of another mind, no matter who it is - an assassin, a fugitive, a man leaning on a balcony at dusk, one or two minutes before a bullet shatters his jaw and pierces his spine, a musician who closes his eyes to play the piano.
Like A Fading Shadow, taking its title from Psalm 102:11 :"My days are like a fading shadow; and I am withered like grass,” is my 5th Antonio Muñoz Molina book after Sepharad, A Manuscript of Ashes and In Her Absence, In the Night of Time.
These previous books have been translated by a roll-call of the elite of Spanish-English translation, Margaret Sayers Peden (Sepharad), Esther Allen (In Her Absence) and Edith Grossman (Night of Time and Manuscript of Ashes). Here the translator, Camilo A. Ramirez, was new to me, and it took me a few pages to get into the voice, although any issues soon passed.
The novel is told in three interwoven strands, all based around visits to Lisbon, two historic visits in particular:
Perhaps there is no better beginning than an impersonal statement of fact. Thus literature can claim or mimic the objectivity of the world. That is why my favourite first line is that of Flaubert’s Sentimental Education; it marks the beginning of a trip and reads like an administrative record or logbook entry: “in front of the Quai St Bernard, the Ville de Monterrey, which was just about to start, was puffing great whirlwinds of smoke. It was six o’ clock on the morning of the 15th of September, 1840.”
At eleven o’clock on the night of 1 January 1987, the Luisitania Express left Madrid Atocha Station heading towards Lisbon. On May 8, 1968, at one thirty in the morning, a traveler in his forties, wearing a dark suit and a raincoat, arrived at the Lisbon airport on a flight from London.
This putative opening actually comes halfway through the book. The novel actually begins:
I awake inside his mind; frightened, disoriented from so much reading and researching. As if my eyes had opened in an unfamiliar room. Angst from the dream lingers. I had committed a heinous crime or was being pursued and condemned despite my innocence. Someone was pointing a gun at me and I could not run or defend myself. I could not move. Before thoughts can fully form, the secret novelist inside us all is already plotting stories. The room in shadows was concave and the ceiling low like a cave or basement or the skull that holds his brain, his feverish mind, exhausted from reading and solitary thinking, with all his memories, his physical features, the images of his life, his heart palpitations, the propensity to believe he had contracted a fatal disease, cancer, an angina, the routine of hiding and fleeing.
I woke up and for a moment I forgot where I was and I was like him, or he himself, because I was having a dream more his than mine. I was in shock that I could not recognize the room where I had fallen asleep just two hours earlier; was not able to remember the position of the bed in relation to the window and other furniture, or my location in a space that was suddenly unknown; I even struggled trying to remember what city I was in. This probably happened to him often, after sleeping in so many places while on the run, thirteen months and three weeks, five countries, fifteen cities, two continents, not to mention all the nights in different motels and boarding houses, the nights curled, shivering against a tree, or under a bridge, or in the backseat of the car, or on a bus that smells of tobacco and plastic and arrives at the underground parking of a station at three in the morning, or that night he was so anxious, flying for the first time, paralyzed by fear, looking out through the small oval window into that dark abyss, the surface of the ocean shining like wet ink under the moonlight. (He would fly overnight once more, crossing the Atlantic in the opposite direction; this time in handcuffs and fetters; dozing off against the window, in a dream where the handcuffs transformed into vines and the weight of the fetters was the mud where his feet were sinking.)
The him in this sentence is James Earl Ray, assassin of Martin Luther King on April 4, 1968. His identity emerges only gradually in the pages of the novel but in reality any reader is likely to know before opening the first page of the book or if not to discover it by googling the clues – which itself raises interesting issues for me on reading in the internet age.
Following the killing, Ray, who was already on the run from prison since July 1967, fled the scene, first to Canada, then to London and, from May 8th-16th 1968, Lisbon, from where he had hoped to find sanctuary in a pro-white supremacist African state, perhaps as a mercenary.
In one strand of the novel, Muñoz Molina attempts to reconstruct Ray’s time in Lisbon, and his flight generally. The internet makes it easy for him to find out detailed facts:
it only takes a few seconds online to access the archives containing detailed accounts of almost everything he did, places he visited... even the names of women who slept with him or shared a drink at a bar ... [or] the brand of salted crackers left open and half-eaten in a rented room in a boarding house in Atlanta where his name never made it to the register because the owner was too drunk to ask for it.
and yet that tells us nothing about the person himself:
It is amazing how much you can learn about a person and still never truly know him, because he never said what was most important: a dark hole, a blank space; a mug shot, the rough lines of a facial composite based on disjointed testimonies and vague memories.
Ray in particular was something of an enigma. He was perhaps the most wanted man in the world at the time, but his very anonymity (and the technological limitations on police work at the time) made it relatively easy for him to evade capture.
He was obsessed with spy literature – when eventually arrested in June 1968 at Heathrow airport, he was found with two spy novels, Ninth Directive and Tangier Assignment with Bond-like protagonists, and one of his many aliases was Eric Starvo Galt based on Bond’s enemy Ernst Stavro Blofeld.
He was also in possession of the book Psycho-Cybernetics and Self-Fulfillment by Maxwell Maltz, a forerunner of Tony Robbins style positive thinking and the ideas of NLP, and a pamphlet on hypnosis, and the author effectively uses these books to create a picture of Ray’s mental processes to add to the detailed accounts available of his life.
The novel’s 2nd strand has Muñoz Molina look back on another historical visit to Lisbon by a rather unsympathetic character with multiple identities – the young Muñoz Molina himself.
In late 1986, about to turn 31, he was leading two double lives – a bachelor during the week and family man only at weekends, his wife, a teacher, looking after two infant children (Antonio a 3yo and Arturo, a 1 month old) in Madrid whereas he worked in Granada. And during the week, leading a double life as an office bureaucrat during the day and a partying bohemian and jazz fan at night as well as an emerging author.
I was a father and a husband, and also a foolish adolescent, an apprentice in the art of the novel and a bureaucrat. I was undercover all right, but was I infiltrating the underworld or City Hall.
..
Equally incompetent at marriage and fleeting affairs; as ill-equipped for an administrative job and family life as I was for the methodical chaos of bar life, I kept on retreating into an intimate paralysis fed almost entirely by fictions.
He was working on the novel that was to be his breakthrough – Winter in Lisbon – a modernist take on noir with characters who refer to Casablanca but seem constrained to follow the plot of The Maltese Falcon, with Lisbon standing in for San Francisco and a stolen Cezanne painting the dingus. An excerpt from the English translation:
I had been reading The Great Gatsby and was impressed by the narrative voice and gaze of Nick Carraway. Gatsby was not a hero whose exploits Nick happened to witness: he was a hero precisely because Nick was observing him. His legend was not in his person or his acts but in the perspective of another person; his ultimate ambiguity, that blank space at the centre of his character and most of his biography, was the result of missing information ... everything that was unknown or left unsaid about Gatsby added to his persona and deepened his mystery like the negative space that on paper or canvas strengthens a composition.
...
My mistake, all that time, had been to try to fill every gap with unnecessary details, fill all the space in the story like a mediocre painter fills a whole canvas or a pretentious musician leaves no space for silence.
But at a certain point, his imagination failed him and compelled him to visit Lisbon to see the place where he had planned to set his story:
I don’t think I even got to put a new sheet of paper in the typewriter before realising that if the novel was to continue I had no choice but to travel to Lisbon.
And on 1 January 1987, despite having a newborn (4 week old) and three-year old child, he left his family to make a brief visit to Lisbon, his first ever overseas trip, one he has described elsewhere as a ‘scouting trip’.
Unfortunately for the English-language reader, Sepharad rather than Winter in Lisbon was his breakthrough novel here, and the latter book although translated by Sonia Soto, is out of print, which slightly diminishes the effect of this strand of the novel. I am indebted to one of my favourite blogs, Tony’s Reading List (who is also chairing our MBI Shadow Jury) for an English-language review of the book, albeit he read the Spanish original as well as this academic article on the novel:
"We'll always have Lisbon": Cinematic Intertextuality in Antonio Muñoz Molina's "El invierno en Lisboa", Literature/Film Quarterly.
This visit by Muñoz Molina to Lisbon was very brief and, per the Literature/Film Quarterly article, unsurprisingly didn’t actually yield any great insights into Lisbon itself:
4 years later, now established as an author following the success of Winter in Lisbon, and father of three children (Elena was born in 1989), Muñoz Molina made another brief and pivotal trip to Lisbon for a book tour, the key being not the trip itself but the return to Madrid, where that night he began an affair with the journalist Elvira Lindo which led to him separating from his wife.
The third strand of the book is written in the near present. In 2012, Muñoz Molina visited Lisbon again, with Lindo who is addressed as ‘you’ in the book, to see his 2nd son Arturo, now living in Lisbon and celebrating his 26th birthday. It was this visit that prompted him to recall Ray’s period of refuge in Lisbon, to reflect on the nature of fiction, and to write this novel.
He also visited Memphis itself where, when seeing many of the objects found in Ray’s possession, he thinks:
Objects say what we don’t; they reveal in public what we would prefer to keep secret. What they say without words makes fiction irrelevant.
But one still wants to imagine. Literature is the desire to dwell inside the mind of another person, like an intruder in a house, to see the world through someone else's eyes, from the interior of those windows where no one ever seems to peek out. It's impossible but one does not renounce the optical illusion.
This trip and a return visit to Lisbon in 2014 to complete the novel, and from which the opening of the book is taken, were also documented in photographs by Elvira Lindo- see https://elpais.com/elpais/2014/11/20/...
Muñoz Molina makes the slightly odd decision to write the last chapter of the novel not from Ray’s perspective but from Martin Luther King’s, in the mind of “a man leaning on a balcony at dusk, one or two minutes before a bullet shatters his jaw and pierces his spine”. I am not convinced this part worked, and the author seems to use it in part to repeat the allegations that King was actually having an affair while staying at the motel where he was shot, but it does nod towards what was to be King’s last ever speech, one uncannily prophetic given what happened the next day, and which I will reproduce in part to finish my review:
To write fiction is to see the world through the eyes of another person, to hear it through somebody else’s ears. It is the audacity to believe you can know the secrets of another mind, no matter who it is - an assassin, a fugitive, a man leaning on a balcony at dusk, one or two minutes before a bullet shatters his jaw and pierces his spine, a musician who closes his eyes to play the piano.
Like A Fading Shadow, taking its title from Psalm 102:11 :"My days are like a fading shadow; and I am withered like grass,” is my 5th Antonio Muñoz Molina book after Sepharad, A Manuscript of Ashes and In Her Absence, In the Night of Time.
These previous books have been translated by a roll-call of the elite of Spanish-English translation, Margaret Sayers Peden (Sepharad), Esther Allen (In Her Absence) and Edith Grossman (Night of Time and Manuscript of Ashes). Here the translator, Camilo A. Ramirez, was new to me, and it took me a few pages to get into the voice, although any issues soon passed.
The novel is told in three interwoven strands, all based around visits to Lisbon, two historic visits in particular:
Perhaps there is no better beginning than an impersonal statement of fact. Thus literature can claim or mimic the objectivity of the world. That is why my favourite first line is that of Flaubert’s Sentimental Education; it marks the beginning of a trip and reads like an administrative record or logbook entry: “in front of the Quai St Bernard, the Ville de Monterrey, which was just about to start, was puffing great whirlwinds of smoke. It was six o’ clock on the morning of the 15th of September, 1840.”
At eleven o’clock on the night of 1 January 1987, the Luisitania Express left Madrid Atocha Station heading towards Lisbon. On May 8, 1968, at one thirty in the morning, a traveler in his forties, wearing a dark suit and a raincoat, arrived at the Lisbon airport on a flight from London.
This putative opening actually comes halfway through the book. The novel actually begins:
I awake inside his mind; frightened, disoriented from so much reading and researching. As if my eyes had opened in an unfamiliar room. Angst from the dream lingers. I had committed a heinous crime or was being pursued and condemned despite my innocence. Someone was pointing a gun at me and I could not run or defend myself. I could not move. Before thoughts can fully form, the secret novelist inside us all is already plotting stories. The room in shadows was concave and the ceiling low like a cave or basement or the skull that holds his brain, his feverish mind, exhausted from reading and solitary thinking, with all his memories, his physical features, the images of his life, his heart palpitations, the propensity to believe he had contracted a fatal disease, cancer, an angina, the routine of hiding and fleeing.
I woke up and for a moment I forgot where I was and I was like him, or he himself, because I was having a dream more his than mine. I was in shock that I could not recognize the room where I had fallen asleep just two hours earlier; was not able to remember the position of the bed in relation to the window and other furniture, or my location in a space that was suddenly unknown; I even struggled trying to remember what city I was in. This probably happened to him often, after sleeping in so many places while on the run, thirteen months and three weeks, five countries, fifteen cities, two continents, not to mention all the nights in different motels and boarding houses, the nights curled, shivering against a tree, or under a bridge, or in the backseat of the car, or on a bus that smells of tobacco and plastic and arrives at the underground parking of a station at three in the morning, or that night he was so anxious, flying for the first time, paralyzed by fear, looking out through the small oval window into that dark abyss, the surface of the ocean shining like wet ink under the moonlight. (He would fly overnight once more, crossing the Atlantic in the opposite direction; this time in handcuffs and fetters; dozing off against the window, in a dream where the handcuffs transformed into vines and the weight of the fetters was the mud where his feet were sinking.)
The him in this sentence is James Earl Ray, assassin of Martin Luther King on April 4, 1968. His identity emerges only gradually in the pages of the novel but in reality any reader is likely to know before opening the first page of the book or if not to discover it by googling the clues – which itself raises interesting issues for me on reading in the internet age.
Following the killing, Ray, who was already on the run from prison since July 1967, fled the scene, first to Canada, then to London and, from May 8th-16th 1968, Lisbon, from where he had hoped to find sanctuary in a pro-white supremacist African state, perhaps as a mercenary.
In one strand of the novel, Muñoz Molina attempts to reconstruct Ray’s time in Lisbon, and his flight generally. The internet makes it easy for him to find out detailed facts:
it only takes a few seconds online to access the archives containing detailed accounts of almost everything he did, places he visited... even the names of women who slept with him or shared a drink at a bar ... [or] the brand of salted crackers left open and half-eaten in a rented room in a boarding house in Atlanta where his name never made it to the register because the owner was too drunk to ask for it.
and yet that tells us nothing about the person himself:
It is amazing how much you can learn about a person and still never truly know him, because he never said what was most important: a dark hole, a blank space; a mug shot, the rough lines of a facial composite based on disjointed testimonies and vague memories.
Ray in particular was something of an enigma. He was perhaps the most wanted man in the world at the time, but his very anonymity (and the technological limitations on police work at the time) made it relatively easy for him to evade capture.
He was obsessed with spy literature – when eventually arrested in June 1968 at Heathrow airport, he was found with two spy novels, Ninth Directive and Tangier Assignment with Bond-like protagonists, and one of his many aliases was Eric Starvo Galt based on Bond’s enemy Ernst Stavro Blofeld.
He was also in possession of the book Psycho-Cybernetics and Self-Fulfillment by Maxwell Maltz, a forerunner of Tony Robbins style positive thinking and the ideas of NLP, and a pamphlet on hypnosis, and the author effectively uses these books to create a picture of Ray’s mental processes to add to the detailed accounts available of his life.
The novel’s 2nd strand has Muñoz Molina look back on another historical visit to Lisbon by a rather unsympathetic character with multiple identities – the young Muñoz Molina himself.
In late 1986, about to turn 31, he was leading two double lives – a bachelor during the week and family man only at weekends, his wife, a teacher, looking after two infant children (Antonio a 3yo and Arturo, a 1 month old) in Madrid whereas he worked in Granada. And during the week, leading a double life as an office bureaucrat during the day and a partying bohemian and jazz fan at night as well as an emerging author.
I was a father and a husband, and also a foolish adolescent, an apprentice in the art of the novel and a bureaucrat. I was undercover all right, but was I infiltrating the underworld or City Hall.
..
Equally incompetent at marriage and fleeting affairs; as ill-equipped for an administrative job and family life as I was for the methodical chaos of bar life, I kept on retreating into an intimate paralysis fed almost entirely by fictions.
He was working on the novel that was to be his breakthrough – Winter in Lisbon – a modernist take on noir with characters who refer to Casablanca but seem constrained to follow the plot of The Maltese Falcon, with Lisbon standing in for San Francisco and a stolen Cezanne painting the dingus. An excerpt from the English translation:
On the Gran Via, by the cold gleaming windows of the Telefonica building, he went over to a kiosk to buy cigarettes. As I watched him walk back, tall, swaying, hands sunk in the pockets of his large open overcoat with the collar turned up, I realized that he had that strong air of character one always finds in people who carry a past, as in those who carry a gun. These aren't vague literary comparisons: he did have a past, and he kept a gun.One key break through when writing the novel was prompted by The Great Gatsby:
I had been reading The Great Gatsby and was impressed by the narrative voice and gaze of Nick Carraway. Gatsby was not a hero whose exploits Nick happened to witness: he was a hero precisely because Nick was observing him. His legend was not in his person or his acts but in the perspective of another person; his ultimate ambiguity, that blank space at the centre of his character and most of his biography, was the result of missing information ... everything that was unknown or left unsaid about Gatsby added to his persona and deepened his mystery like the negative space that on paper or canvas strengthens a composition.
...
My mistake, all that time, had been to try to fill every gap with unnecessary details, fill all the space in the story like a mediocre painter fills a whole canvas or a pretentious musician leaves no space for silence.
But at a certain point, his imagination failed him and compelled him to visit Lisbon to see the place where he had planned to set his story:
I don’t think I even got to put a new sheet of paper in the typewriter before realising that if the novel was to continue I had no choice but to travel to Lisbon.
And on 1 January 1987, despite having a newborn (4 week old) and three-year old child, he left his family to make a brief visit to Lisbon, his first ever overseas trip, one he has described elsewhere as a ‘scouting trip’.
Unfortunately for the English-language reader, Sepharad rather than Winter in Lisbon was his breakthrough novel here, and the latter book although translated by Sonia Soto, is out of print, which slightly diminishes the effect of this strand of the novel. I am indebted to one of my favourite blogs, Tony’s Reading List (who is also chairing our MBI Shadow Jury) for an English-language review of the book, albeit he read the Spanish original as well as this academic article on the novel:
"We'll always have Lisbon": Cinematic Intertextuality in Antonio Muñoz Molina's "El invierno en Lisboa", Literature/Film Quarterly.
This visit by Muñoz Molina to Lisbon was very brief and, per the Literature/Film Quarterly article, unsurprisingly didn’t actually yield any great insights into Lisbon itself:
We find ourselves in a rather vague geography ... His Lisbon. as the author admits, is the result of a sort of "location scouting" while writing the novel. With apologies to Gertrude Stein, there is no here here.But the author has clearly been to Lisbon many times since, and in Like a Fading Shadow creates a very effective portrait of perhaps my favourite city in Europe, certainly the most characterful. He is particularly taken with the various statues in Lisbon, notably that kings on horseback, such as King José in the middle of Praça do Comércio:
4 years later, now established as an author following the success of Winter in Lisbon, and father of three children (Elena was born in 1989), Muñoz Molina made another brief and pivotal trip to Lisbon for a book tour, the key being not the trip itself but the return to Madrid, where that night he began an affair with the journalist Elvira Lindo which led to him separating from his wife.
The third strand of the book is written in the near present. In 2012, Muñoz Molina visited Lisbon again, with Lindo who is addressed as ‘you’ in the book, to see his 2nd son Arturo, now living in Lisbon and celebrating his 26th birthday. It was this visit that prompted him to recall Ray’s period of refuge in Lisbon, to reflect on the nature of fiction, and to write this novel.
He also visited Memphis itself where, when seeing many of the objects found in Ray’s possession, he thinks:
Objects say what we don’t; they reveal in public what we would prefer to keep secret. What they say without words makes fiction irrelevant.
But one still wants to imagine. Literature is the desire to dwell inside the mind of another person, like an intruder in a house, to see the world through someone else's eyes, from the interior of those windows where no one ever seems to peek out. It's impossible but one does not renounce the optical illusion.
This trip and a return visit to Lisbon in 2014 to complete the novel, and from which the opening of the book is taken, were also documented in photographs by Elvira Lindo- see https://elpais.com/elpais/2014/11/20/...
Muñoz Molina makes the slightly odd decision to write the last chapter of the novel not from Ray’s perspective but from Martin Luther King’s, in the mind of “a man leaning on a balcony at dusk, one or two minutes before a bullet shatters his jaw and pierces his spine”. I am not convinced this part worked, and the author seems to use it in part to repeat the allegations that King was actually having an affair while staying at the motel where he was shot, but it does nod towards what was to be King’s last ever speech, one uncannily prophetic given what happened the next day, and which I will reproduce in part to finish my review:
And then I got into Memphis. And some began to say the threats, or talk about the threats that were out. What would happen to me from some of our sick white brothers?Overall, this was certainly a stimulating work, as shown by the length of my review. However, I wasn’t particularly convinced that the part about the author as a 31 year-old really linked with the story of Ray, and the musings on writing fiction are a little too scattered throughout the novel to cohere. 3.5 stars.
Well, I don't know what will happen now. We've got some difficult days ahead. But it really doesn't matter with me now, because I've been to the mountaintop.
And I don't mind.
Like anybody, I would like to live a long life. Longevity has its place. But I'm not concerned about that now. I just want to do God's will. And He's allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I've looked over. And I've seen the Promised Land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people, will get to the promised land.
April 7, 2018
It is only a few weeks since I re-read Don DeLillo’s Libra and it would be wrong of me to not start there because there are huge similarities between that DeLillo book and this from Munoz Molina. DeLillo takes Lee Harvey Oswald, the killer of John Fitzgerald Kennedy. Munoz Molina takes James Earl Ray, the killer of Martin Luther King. Both give us an historical fiction version of their chosen character. The difference is that DeLillo’s account is mixed in with a narrative about the CIA and a CIA operative a lot further in the future collating records, whereas Munoz Molina’s account is mixed with a personal memoir about time spent in Lisbon and and him as an older man looking back.
At first sight, there is no connection between Munoz Molina’s account of Ray’s flight after shooting King and brief time he ended up spending in Lisbon and the author’s own memoir apart from the fact that both involve Lisbon. For quite some time as I read this book, I was confused by its structure and wondering what made it a novel rather than two or three novellas. Munoz Molina has forced it into being a novel by interleaving the narratives. But is that enough? It was only about three-quarters of the way through the book that I came to view that, yes, it is enough because this is a metafictional novel that is playing with ideas about literature and fiction.
"To write fiction is to see the world through the eyes of another person, to hear it through somebody else’s ears. It is the audacity to believe you can know the secrets of another mind, no matter who it is—an assassin, a fugitive, a man leaning on a balcony at dusk, one or two minutes before a bullet shatters his jaw and pierces his spine, a musician who closes his eyes to play the piano."
The metafictional aspect of the book is the only thing that means it can be called a novel. In the sections that are his memoirs, the author discusses the topic of “fiction” and the creation of fictional characters for novels. In the sections focused on Ray, we read a lot about Ray trying to force himself to become the person he imagines he wants to be (carefully conscious of the right actions, the right words to fit with this fictional persona). And then he also links the threads through visits to Lisbon. Ray fled there to try to escape after assassinating King and Munoz Molina flees there to escape from his life and to complete his book. Both flee real life and seek sanctuary in fiction in Lisbon. So, the connections only exist because Munoz Molina creates them: they are not natural connections. And I think that must be at least one of the main points of the book: in fiction you can make anything happen that you want to happen (or, at least, you can try: it doesn’t work so well for Ray trying to escape from the police).
So far, so good. Although I was struggling for a while to make sense of the book, once this penny dropped, I could appreciate that this is, in fact, very clever.
However, "very clever" isn’t really enough on its own. There needs to be something to engage the reader. And this is where I felt that this book fell down, especially when held up against Libra. This is a personal view and others will read both books and come to exactly the opposite view. I had to think quite carefully about what it is that makes Libra better than this, and I think it is this: Libra takes you inside Oswald’s head, this book gives you facts about Ray. On page 2 of this book, the author says:
"It only takes a few seconds online to access the archives containing detailed accounts of almost everything he did, places he visited, crimes he committed, prisons where he was held, even the names of women who slept with him or shared a drink at a bar. I know the magazines and novels he read and the brand of salted crackers left open and half-eaten in a rented room in a boardinghouse in Atlanta where his name never made it to the register because the owner was too drunk to ask for it."
And then large parts of the story about Ray seem to be simply "cut and paste" out of these detailed accounts. The narrative is full of facts, too full at times, and it did not engage me in the way that DeLillo's book did when it took me into Oswald’s story.
In the end, once I realised what I think is going on, I can see that this is a very clever book full of thoughts about literature and fiction. But my personal preference would always be to read Libra because this one didn’t engage me in anything like the same way.
PS For another book that plays with a metanarrative about fiction, you could try Asymmetry which has three separate novellas linked by a metafictional idea.
At first sight, there is no connection between Munoz Molina’s account of Ray’s flight after shooting King and brief time he ended up spending in Lisbon and the author’s own memoir apart from the fact that both involve Lisbon. For quite some time as I read this book, I was confused by its structure and wondering what made it a novel rather than two or three novellas. Munoz Molina has forced it into being a novel by interleaving the narratives. But is that enough? It was only about three-quarters of the way through the book that I came to view that, yes, it is enough because this is a metafictional novel that is playing with ideas about literature and fiction.
"To write fiction is to see the world through the eyes of another person, to hear it through somebody else’s ears. It is the audacity to believe you can know the secrets of another mind, no matter who it is—an assassin, a fugitive, a man leaning on a balcony at dusk, one or two minutes before a bullet shatters his jaw and pierces his spine, a musician who closes his eyes to play the piano."
The metafictional aspect of the book is the only thing that means it can be called a novel. In the sections that are his memoirs, the author discusses the topic of “fiction” and the creation of fictional characters for novels. In the sections focused on Ray, we read a lot about Ray trying to force himself to become the person he imagines he wants to be (carefully conscious of the right actions, the right words to fit with this fictional persona). And then he also links the threads through visits to Lisbon. Ray fled there to try to escape after assassinating King and Munoz Molina flees there to escape from his life and to complete his book. Both flee real life and seek sanctuary in fiction in Lisbon. So, the connections only exist because Munoz Molina creates them: they are not natural connections. And I think that must be at least one of the main points of the book: in fiction you can make anything happen that you want to happen (or, at least, you can try: it doesn’t work so well for Ray trying to escape from the police).
So far, so good. Although I was struggling for a while to make sense of the book, once this penny dropped, I could appreciate that this is, in fact, very clever.
However, "very clever" isn’t really enough on its own. There needs to be something to engage the reader. And this is where I felt that this book fell down, especially when held up against Libra. This is a personal view and others will read both books and come to exactly the opposite view. I had to think quite carefully about what it is that makes Libra better than this, and I think it is this: Libra takes you inside Oswald’s head, this book gives you facts about Ray. On page 2 of this book, the author says:
"It only takes a few seconds online to access the archives containing detailed accounts of almost everything he did, places he visited, crimes he committed, prisons where he was held, even the names of women who slept with him or shared a drink at a bar. I know the magazines and novels he read and the brand of salted crackers left open and half-eaten in a rented room in a boardinghouse in Atlanta where his name never made it to the register because the owner was too drunk to ask for it."
And then large parts of the story about Ray seem to be simply "cut and paste" out of these detailed accounts. The narrative is full of facts, too full at times, and it did not engage me in the way that DeLillo's book did when it took me into Oswald’s story.
In the end, once I realised what I think is going on, I can see that this is a very clever book full of thoughts about literature and fiction. But my personal preference would always be to read Libra because this one didn’t engage me in anything like the same way.
PS For another book that plays with a metanarrative about fiction, you could try Asymmetry which has three separate novellas linked by a metafictional idea.
Read
August 22, 2024"أيامي كظلّ مائل، وأنا مثل العشب يبست" – سفر المزامير
ضحية تُجهزُ على أخرى، أما الجلاد الحقيقي فهو شاهد من علٍّ، كيف لا وهو صانعٌ لهذه الضحايا؟! لربما هي لعنة المواصفات العصرية، أو لعنة الحياة ككل واللاعدالة التي تتسم بها، وليس حقبة أو فترة زمنية فقط، إذ تتغير الأسباب ومنتج الظلم واحد.
دائمًا ما كنا نتساءل أنا وأحد الأصدقاء وفي مواقف معينة، إذ كان هنالك من قدرة فعلية لنا ووجودية وضميرية وأخلاقية وشرطها العدالة بالمعنى الواسع على أن نشير بالبنان والتصنيف ما بين البشر إلى من هو جلاد ومن هو ضحية، هل هنالك ما هو واضحٌ فعلًا؟ والسؤال هنا يتجاوز ما هو قانوني أو متعلق بالإيغو البشري أو ما هو "حق" باللغة القانونية. فهل هنالك فعلًا جلادين وضحايا؟ ألسنا جميعًا تشكيلات من فعل الجلد والضحيوية حتى في الموقف نفسه؟! هذا الحديث عاد إلى تفكيري أثناء قراءتي لهذا العمل.
وما فكرت به أيضًا؛ أن النظام العالمي اليوم وفي أقصى وأسمى مراحل عدله -وليُرضي ضميره مؤقتًا- يركل الجاني المُعاقب ركلة نهائية ويلغيه مُطلقًا للحكم، وفي أحسن الأحوال وأكثر الأنظمة تقدمًا يُسوّق الجاني على أنه مريضٌ نفسي أو حاملٌ لاضطرابات ما، وذلك دون أي إضافة أو متابعة جذرية حقيقية لمكامن ومنابع الإجرام والضياع. ويقوم هذا النظام بعملية حذف لأي ماضي رحيم في حياة الجاني فيجعل من لحظة وقوع الجريمة لحظةَ ولادة له، ويختصر كل ما من سماته إلى الإجرام فقط، دون النظر إلى أي ماض أو أي أسباب، وهذا ما لا يفعله الأدب والفن في محاولاته للانتصار للإنسان، إذ إنه دائمًا هناك صوت يحاول أن يعلو فوق ما هو "عادل" اليوم أو حتى فوق أصوات الحشود الكثيرة الرافضة!
هذه رواية عن الحدث من زواياه العديدة؛ عن قضية مقتل (مارتن لوثر كينغ) فصول تُفرد عن قاتله وكيف حاول الكاتب اجتياز وعيه لمعرفة أو لتقدير أكبر قدر من الوقائع التي أدّت أو تسببت بهذه المقتلة. عن الطفولة الفقيرة والمشردة للقاتل، سردٌ محايد متقصيًا محاولًا إعطاء صوتٍ للجميع.
لا تنطوي الرواية على فصول القاتل والمقتول فقط، إذ إن الكاتب يفرد فصولًا عن الكتابة وكتابته هو شخصيًا وظروفها، لاسيما انتقاله إلى مدينة لشبونة ليكتب بعض الفصول "من المكان" حيث عاش هناك راي/ القاتل لأيام معدودة، بالإضافة إلى استذكاره لأيام كتابته روايته (الشتاء في لشبونة) فيُطلع القارئ على كواليس كتابة الرواية. فصول الكتابة هذه كانت الأقرب إلى قلبي والأكثر تميزًا.
ضحية تُجهزُ على أخرى، أما الجلاد الحقيقي فهو شاهد من علٍّ، كيف لا وهو صانعٌ لهذه الضحايا؟! لربما هي لعنة المواصفات العصرية، أو لعنة الحياة ككل واللاعدالة التي تتسم بها، وليس حقبة أو فترة زمنية فقط، إذ تتغير الأسباب ومنتج الظلم واحد.
دائمًا ما كنا نتساءل أنا وأحد الأصدقاء وفي مواقف معينة، إذ كان هنالك من قدرة فعلية لنا ووجودية وضميرية وأخلاقية وشرطها العدالة بالمعنى الواسع على أن نشير بالبنان والتصنيف ما بين البشر إلى من هو جلاد ومن هو ضحية، هل هنالك ما هو واضحٌ فعلًا؟ والسؤال هنا يتجاوز ما هو قانوني أو متعلق بالإيغو البشري أو ما هو "حق" باللغة القانونية. فهل هنالك فعلًا جلادين وضحايا؟ ألسنا جميعًا تشكيلات من فعل الجلد والضحيوية حتى في الموقف نفسه؟! هذا الحديث عاد إلى تفكيري أثناء قراءتي لهذا العمل.
وما فكرت به أيضًا؛ أن النظام العالمي اليوم وفي أقصى وأسمى مراحل عدله -وليُرضي ضميره مؤقتًا- يركل الجاني المُعاقب ركلة نهائية ويلغيه مُطلقًا للحكم، وفي أحسن الأحوال وأكثر الأنظمة تقدمًا يُسوّق الجاني على أنه مريضٌ نفسي أو حاملٌ لاضطرابات ما، وذلك دون أي إضافة أو متابعة جذرية حقيقية لمكامن ومنابع الإجرام والضياع. ويقوم هذا النظام بعملية حذف لأي ماضي رحيم في حياة الجاني فيجعل من لحظة وقوع الجريمة لحظةَ ولادة له، ويختصر كل ما من سماته إلى الإجرام فقط، دون النظر إلى أي ماض أو أي أسباب، وهذا ما لا يفعله الأدب والفن في محاولاته للانتصار للإنسان، إذ إنه دائمًا هناك صوت يحاول أن يعلو فوق ما هو "عادل" اليوم أو حتى فوق أصوات الحشود الكثيرة الرافضة!
هذه رواية عن الحدث من زواياه العديدة؛ عن قضية مقتل (مارتن لوثر كينغ) فصول تُفرد عن قاتله وكيف حاول الكاتب اجتياز وعيه لمعرفة أو لتقدير أكبر قدر من الوقائع التي أدّت أو تسببت بهذه المقتلة. عن الطفولة الفقيرة والمشردة للقاتل، سردٌ محايد متقصيًا محاولًا إعطاء صوتٍ للجميع.
لا تنطوي الرواية على فصول القاتل والمقتول فقط، إذ إن الكاتب يفرد فصولًا عن الكتابة وكتابته هو شخصيًا وظروفها، لاسيما انتقاله إلى مدينة لشبونة ليكتب بعض الفصول "من المكان" حيث عاش هناك راي/ القاتل لأيام معدودة، بالإضافة إلى استذكاره لأيام كتابته روايته (الشتاء في لشبونة) فيُطلع القارئ على كواليس كتابة الرواية. فصول الكتابة هذه كانت الأقرب إلى قلبي والأكثر تميزًا.
October 17, 2020
The book really a memoir and a historical fiction combined. The memoir part has a few beautiful parts but historical novel part is just forgettable.
January 24, 2015
Magníficamente escrito y sin embargo vacío. Entrelaza las historias del asesino de Luther King y el autor mismo, con un nivel de detalle casi enfermizo que cauteriza cualquier tipo de aproximación emocional a lo que allí se cuenta. La confesión de Muñoz Molina casi es sonrojante, al estilo del noruego Karl Ove Knausgard, llegando a un nivel de intimidad exagerado. Pero la forma es magnífica. Frase larga, cadenciosa, trabajada. Repeticiones de estructuras que recuerdan las composiciones de jazz, casi recordando a Cortázar. Una pena que no sea más atractiva la historia que se cuenta.
April 2, 2018
In just two days, the fiftieth anniversary of the tragic murder of Martin Luther King will pass. I did not have that in mind when I began a week or so ago to read Muñoz's 2014 book "Like a Fading Shadow." Although James Earl Ray, in a slightly fictionalized garb, is the central character in this piece of historical fiction, it was not his name so much as the setting in Lisbon, one of my favorite cities, that attracted me. Muñoz's first novel, "Winter in Lisbon" was set in the Portuguese capital and here he returns to that city to complete his account of the ten or so days Ray spent hiding there after the assassination. Ray is a loser whose identify is indeed like a "fading shadow" as he shifts from one pseudonym to another, walks about Lisbon keeping his eyes from contact with others, and shuffles from bar to bar with his small amount of cash slowly slipping away. The novelist's story of his own life and time in Lisbon alternates with his account of Ray, and Muñoz too is leading a life of instability . . . a life in which his personality fades while in the process of seeking out the various shadows that inspire his own work. We must not forget, however, that Muñoz is leading us through the city of the great Fernando Pessoa, whom he mentions on several occasions, and so much of Pessoa's work reflects the shifting personalities and names the writer can take on, perhaps somehow inspired (or is it cursed?) by the wonderful and multifaceted city of Lisbon.
July 31, 2024
‘Kurmaca yazmak dünyayı başkalarının kulağıyla duymaktır. İster katil, ister kaçak, ister tüfek mermisi çenesini kırıp boynunu deldikten sonra omuriliğini deşmeye bir-iki dakika kala korkuluğa dayanmış bir adam, ister gözleri kapalı piyano çalan bir müzisyen, kim olursa olsun, başkasının aklında içinde olup biteni içeriden yakalayabileceğine inanma çılgınlığıdır.’
.
Bu çılgınlığı başarıyor Molina. Kendini yazarken bir yandan da Martin Luther King’i öldüren tüfeği ellerinde tutan James Earl Ray oluyor.
Bir hikaye nasıl başlar diye soruyor ve en bilinen yöntemlerden birini kullanıyor:
Şehre bir yabancı getiriyor.
Şehrimiz Lizbon, zamanımızın geçmiş,bugün ve gelecek, karakterlerimiz yazmaya çalışan bir adam ve bir kaçak~
.
İlk sayfalarda atlamaların çokluğuyla kafa karıştırıcı olabilen ama sonradan (sonunu bilmemize rağmen) keyifle okunan bir eser Uzayıp Giden Bir Gölge Gibi.
Altını çizdiğim pek çok cümlenin yanı sıra Antonio Munoz Molina’nın titizliğini-hayran olduğu isimleri (Onetti ve Bioy Casares okumak için sabırsızlanıyorum) -şeffaflığını ve bazı yerlerdeki takıntılarını çok sevdim.
.
‘Her hikaye bir son ister’ diyor Molina, hikayeyi taşıyıp, teslim ederken duyduğu hafiflik hissini de biliyoruz sanki~
Bir yabancı şehre gelir ve artık yabancı olmadığında gitmesi gerekir~
.
Murat Tanakol çevirisi, Yeşim Ercan Aydın kapak tasarımıyla ~
.
Bu çılgınlığı başarıyor Molina. Kendini yazarken bir yandan da Martin Luther King’i öldüren tüfeği ellerinde tutan James Earl Ray oluyor.
Bir hikaye nasıl başlar diye soruyor ve en bilinen yöntemlerden birini kullanıyor:
Şehre bir yabancı getiriyor.
Şehrimiz Lizbon, zamanımızın geçmiş,bugün ve gelecek, karakterlerimiz yazmaya çalışan bir adam ve bir kaçak~
.
İlk sayfalarda atlamaların çokluğuyla kafa karıştırıcı olabilen ama sonradan (sonunu bilmemize rağmen) keyifle okunan bir eser Uzayıp Giden Bir Gölge Gibi.
Altını çizdiğim pek çok cümlenin yanı sıra Antonio Munoz Molina’nın titizliğini-hayran olduğu isimleri (Onetti ve Bioy Casares okumak için sabırsızlanıyorum) -şeffaflığını ve bazı yerlerdeki takıntılarını çok sevdim.
.
‘Her hikaye bir son ister’ diyor Molina, hikayeyi taşıyıp, teslim ederken duyduğu hafiflik hissini de biliyoruz sanki~
Bir yabancı şehre gelir ve artık yabancı olmadığında gitmesi gerekir~
.
Murat Tanakol çevirisi, Yeşim Ercan Aydın kapak tasarımıyla ~
April 1, 2018
The format of this book was quite different. It is both a historical fiction novel and a memoir. The book starts with a memoir chapter. The memoir and the historical fiction alternate for more than half the book. Then they begin to become more and more intermixed. The historical fiction part tells the story of James Earl Ray, the man who murdered Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. The fictional part of Ray's story has mostly to do with what was going on in Ray's head, although there is also a chapter near the end in which the author imagines what was going on in King's head on the afternoon that Ray shoots him. Near the end, In the memoir part, the author tells us about different points in his life, starting from when he was writing his first book and spends a whirl-wind three days in Lisbon to find places he can use for scenes in the book. I really liked the writing, which I guess means I also like the translation.
I enjoyed this book but would only have given it 4 stars but for Chapters 24 and 25, especially Chapter 25. Those two chapters touched my soul. They sent me back to 1968 when I was 18 and younger -- those days of the civil rights movement and anti-war protests. I remember my horror when watching the news about the marches, I saw cops beating men and women, including a pregnant women. Is it any wonder we went from peaceful, nonviolent marches to riots? The Spring/Summer of 1968, from King's murder to Bobby Kennedy's murder to the violent Democrat National Convention in Chicago, is burned into my memory. Chapters 24 and 25 brought all that flooding back and made me wonder whether we as a society have made any headway in the 50 years since then.
I was fascinated by the details of Ray's childhood, his prison escape, and his flight to Europe. It was all things I did not know. I was less enamored with the author's life but enjoyed how he explained his writing process, especially the need to be where things happened. I must make a journey to Memphis, Tennessee to see the museum he describes.
This is the fifth book on the MBI longlist that I've read. The alternating between historical fiction and memoir was, I thought, a much better way for an author to insert himself into a novel than how it was done in the Seventh Function of Language.
I enjoyed this book but would only have given it 4 stars but for Chapters 24 and 25, especially Chapter 25. Those two chapters touched my soul. They sent me back to 1968 when I was 18 and younger -- those days of the civil rights movement and anti-war protests. I remember my horror when watching the news about the marches, I saw cops beating men and women, including a pregnant women. Is it any wonder we went from peaceful, nonviolent marches to riots? The Spring/Summer of 1968, from King's murder to Bobby Kennedy's murder to the violent Democrat National Convention in Chicago, is burned into my memory. Chapters 24 and 25 brought all that flooding back and made me wonder whether we as a society have made any headway in the 50 years since then.
I was fascinated by the details of Ray's childhood, his prison escape, and his flight to Europe. It was all things I did not know. I was less enamored with the author's life but enjoyed how he explained his writing process, especially the need to be where things happened. I must make a journey to Memphis, Tennessee to see the museum he describes.
This is the fifth book on the MBI longlist that I've read. The alternating between historical fiction and memoir was, I thought, a much better way for an author to insert himself into a novel than how it was done in the Seventh Function of Language.
September 15, 2022
للكتب قمم كالمرتفعات في جغرافية الأرض (كظلٍّ يرحل) هي أعجوبة من الروايات المترجمة بيد مترجم مبهر بلغته ونقل ما هو إسباني بالعربية الساحرة
February 3, 2015
Puro AMM. A quien le guste su estilo, le encantará; a quien no, que ni lo intente. A mí me gusta el estilo, la forma de narrar como si te estuviera meciendo, como si flotaras en un tibio oleaje. Me gusta y, por lo tanto, me ha gustado la novela. Ahora bien, después de leerla me han surgido algunas preguntas. No entiendo el porqué escribir sobre el asesino de Luter King, no se revela, o, si lo hace, no llega. Se sobreentiende que es por la coincidencia de Lisboa, ciudad que de algún modo le cambió a él. Si es así, no queda bien engarzado y pude verse como algo frío. Cada historia por separada, la suya y la del asesino, me parecen fascinantes, y llevadas como sólo lo hace AMM; en cambio, la búsqueda de un contacto, de una relación singular para el autor, entre las dos historias, ni se explica, ni se ve, ni llega. Por lo menos a mí.
April 22, 2018
¿2.5?
No me gusta que Goodreads no permita medias tintas.
En teoría, esta novela debería ser excepcional, pero cae en un academicismo muy acartonado: este contar al mismo tiempo la historia de James Earl Ray mientras huye de su crimen y de Antonio Muñoz Molina huyendo para escribir su primera novela exitosa (ambos a la ciudad de Lisboa, en distintos momentos) resulta al principio intrigante y después cansada.
A muchos reseñistas les encantó la historia de Ray y la de Molina les pareció una intromisión molesta. A mí me parecieron engorrosas ambas: Molina te da demasiados detalles engorrosos de Ray (qué llevaba en el bolsillo a la hora de qué día, que si lo vieron en quién sabe donde, que si comía hamburguesas con papas todos los días, que si compró aquí, que si leía tal cosa... "interesante puchas qué interesante", diría Nicanor Parra), todos estos en forma de listados de entre dos páginas y capítulos enteros, y el personaje potencialmente interesante se diluye en un mar de datos anodinos, simulando ser de esos registros policiales que ni los abogados soportan leer. Por su parte, la historia de Molina escribiendo su novela podría resultar interesante para los escritores y académicos, pues muestra el proceso creativo de un autor galardonado cuando era un don nadie. Sin embargo, la manufactura de la novela siempre sugiere que ambas historias están imbricadas de una forma muy sutil e ingeniosa, aunque estas relaciones muchas veces resulten demasiado tenues como para notarlas, o de plano arbitrarias. Parecen dos novelas de mediana longitud, barajeadas como si cada capítulo fuera una carta de dos mazos distintos.
En fin, el capítulo de su encuentro con Onetti y Bioy Casares es interesante, si te gustan los libros de Onetti y de Bioy Casares. El capítulo final focalizado en Martin Luther King resulta confuso y parece fuera de lugar. La novela da la sensación de ser una obra mediana firmada por un autor que, con todos los galardones colgando de su frac, daba la impresión, desde lejos, de ser más bien un gigante.
No me gusta que Goodreads no permita medias tintas.
En teoría, esta novela debería ser excepcional, pero cae en un academicismo muy acartonado: este contar al mismo tiempo la historia de James Earl Ray mientras huye de su crimen y de Antonio Muñoz Molina huyendo para escribir su primera novela exitosa (ambos a la ciudad de Lisboa, en distintos momentos) resulta al principio intrigante y después cansada.
A muchos reseñistas les encantó la historia de Ray y la de Molina les pareció una intromisión molesta. A mí me parecieron engorrosas ambas: Molina te da demasiados detalles engorrosos de Ray (qué llevaba en el bolsillo a la hora de qué día, que si lo vieron en quién sabe donde, que si comía hamburguesas con papas todos los días, que si compró aquí, que si leía tal cosa... "interesante puchas qué interesante", diría Nicanor Parra), todos estos en forma de listados de entre dos páginas y capítulos enteros, y el personaje potencialmente interesante se diluye en un mar de datos anodinos, simulando ser de esos registros policiales que ni los abogados soportan leer. Por su parte, la historia de Molina escribiendo su novela podría resultar interesante para los escritores y académicos, pues muestra el proceso creativo de un autor galardonado cuando era un don nadie. Sin embargo, la manufactura de la novela siempre sugiere que ambas historias están imbricadas de una forma muy sutil e ingeniosa, aunque estas relaciones muchas veces resulten demasiado tenues como para notarlas, o de plano arbitrarias. Parecen dos novelas de mediana longitud, barajeadas como si cada capítulo fuera una carta de dos mazos distintos.
En fin, el capítulo de su encuentro con Onetti y Bioy Casares es interesante, si te gustan los libros de Onetti y de Bioy Casares. El capítulo final focalizado en Martin Luther King resulta confuso y parece fuera de lugar. La novela da la sensación de ser una obra mediana firmada por un autor que, con todos los galardones colgando de su frac, daba la impresión, desde lejos, de ser más bien un gigante.
May 26, 2018
Magnifico libro de AMM. Es una mezcla de libro policíaco, novela, biografía y memorias del escritor que tal vez no gustará a todo el mundo pero que a mi me ha llevado en volandas por las calles de Lisboa, Granada y Memphis mientras descubría la vida del asesino de Martin Luther King y la del autor que rememora sus vivencias de joven escritor que pasea por las mismas calles de la capital portuguesa 20 años después del asesino. El final del libro me ha emocionado.
January 3, 2023
رواية حميمة دافئة .. قلم يكتب من القلب
يجعلك تمشي معه في الشوارع، تشعر أحاسبسه وتتمنى لو ان الرواية لا تنتهي
يجعلك تمشي معه في الشوارع، تشعر أحاسبسه وتتمنى لو ان الرواية لا تنتهي
April 20, 2023
Molina’dan daha önce Merdivendeki Ayak Seslerin’i okumuş ve çok beğenmiştim. Yazar, psikolojik atmosfer yaratmakta o kadar başarılı ki tek bir karakterin neredeyse sadece zihninden geçenler ve ruh haliyle okurun elinden bırakamadan ve çok etkilenerek okuduğu bir kurgu çıkarmıştı ortaya. Uzayıp Giden Bir Gölge Gibi’de de güçlü bir ruhsal portre yazarı olmasının yanında, psikolojik dünyalarını detaylıca oluşturduğu karakterlerini siyasi olaylar ve sosyal meselelerle örülmüş, polisiye bir kurguya oturtmakta ve bunu edebi açıdan da zengin bir dille aktardığı anılarıyla eklemleyerek bir kurgu inşa ekmekte de çok başarılı olduğunu göstermiş.
Kurgu, biyografi ve anı gibi farklı türlerin çok ustaca bir araya geldiği metinde iki hikaye var: Birincisinde Molina, 1987 yılından başlayarak, bizzat kendi ağzından hayatını anlatıyor. Evli ve iki çocuk babası bir memurken yazar olma tutkusunun peşinden gitmesi, ilk romanı için Lizbon’a gidip şehri sokak sokak keşfi ve yazma serüveniyle birlikte kurgu, gerçek, yazarlık gibi konularla ilgili fikirlerini de oldukça şeffaf ve samimi bir şekilde paylaşıyor okurla. Bugününden -2013’ten- geçmişine dönüp bakan Molina’yı daha yakından tanırken, Lizbon’u adım adım geziyorsunuz bu kısımlarda. İkinci hikayede ise 1968 yılında Martin Luther King’i öldüren James Earl Ray’in hayatını, dünyasını, işlediği cinayeti ve sonrasını Molina’nın gözünden okuyoruz. Lizbon’dayken araştırmaları sırasında tesadüfen yolu bu olayla kesişen yazar, kendini katili araştırmaya, ruh halini çözümlemeye, olayı analiz etmeye adıyor adeta ve neredeyse adım adım katilin zihnine doğru ilerliyor. Zaman zaman Castillo’nun Karar Gecesi’ni de anımsatan şekilde, ardına düştüğü katilin zihnine, karakterine öyle bir nüfuz ediyor ki neredeyse onunla bütünleşiyor. Burada da bir suçlunun zihninde ve hayatında gezinirken, suça hem psikolojik hem sosyolojik açıdan yaklaşıyor: ABD’deki sivil haklar hareketine değinirken, bir insan ne şartlarda ve nasıl birini öldürebilme raddesine gelir ve öncesinde, o aşamada ve sonrasında neler yaşar, tüm bunları soluksuz okunan bir şekilde kurgulaştırıyor.
Molina’nın anılarıyla edebiyata doyduğum ve aynı zamanda gerçek suç hikayelerine meraklı biri olarak çok keyif aldığım bir metin Uzayıp Giden Bir Gölge Gibi. Görmediğim şehirleri görme, okumadığım yazarları (Onetti gibi) keşfetme isteği uyandırması ve yazarla film zevkimizin uyuşması da bonusuydu benim için.
Kurgu, biyografi ve anı gibi farklı türlerin çok ustaca bir araya geldiği metinde iki hikaye var: Birincisinde Molina, 1987 yılından başlayarak, bizzat kendi ağzından hayatını anlatıyor. Evli ve iki çocuk babası bir memurken yazar olma tutkusunun peşinden gitmesi, ilk romanı için Lizbon’a gidip şehri sokak sokak keşfi ve yazma serüveniyle birlikte kurgu, gerçek, yazarlık gibi konularla ilgili fikirlerini de oldukça şeffaf ve samimi bir şekilde paylaşıyor okurla. Bugününden -2013’ten- geçmişine dönüp bakan Molina’yı daha yakından tanırken, Lizbon’u adım adım geziyorsunuz bu kısımlarda. İkinci hikayede ise 1968 yılında Martin Luther King’i öldüren James Earl Ray’in hayatını, dünyasını, işlediği cinayeti ve sonrasını Molina’nın gözünden okuyoruz. Lizbon’dayken araştırmaları sırasında tesadüfen yolu bu olayla kesişen yazar, kendini katili araştırmaya, ruh halini çözümlemeye, olayı analiz etmeye adıyor adeta ve neredeyse adım adım katilin zihnine doğru ilerliyor. Zaman zaman Castillo’nun Karar Gecesi’ni de anımsatan şekilde, ardına düştüğü katilin zihnine, karakterine öyle bir nüfuz ediyor ki neredeyse onunla bütünleşiyor. Burada da bir suçlunun zihninde ve hayatında gezinirken, suça hem psikolojik hem sosyolojik açıdan yaklaşıyor: ABD’deki sivil haklar hareketine değinirken, bir insan ne şartlarda ve nasıl birini öldürebilme raddesine gelir ve öncesinde, o aşamada ve sonrasında neler yaşar, tüm bunları soluksuz okunan bir şekilde kurgulaştırıyor.
Molina’nın anılarıyla edebiyata doyduğum ve aynı zamanda gerçek suç hikayelerine meraklı biri olarak çok keyif aldığım bir metin Uzayıp Giden Bir Gölge Gibi. Görmediğim şehirleri görme, okumadığım yazarları (Onetti gibi) keşfetme isteği uyandırması ve yazarla film zevkimizin uyuşması da bonusuydu benim için.
May 7, 2018
A slog. Could I have just read a biography of James Early Ray and/or the author's first novel A Winter in Lisbon? Or... the wikipedia page for each? Probably.
PS the author recounting his escapades being a serious writer/alcoholic/womanizer while his wife was home with a newborn and a toddler made me MURDEROUS.
PS the author recounting his escapades being a serious writer/alcoholic/womanizer while his wife was home with a newborn and a toddler made me MURDEROUS.
April 12, 2018
Two completely different stories (one about author’s intimate reflections on writing, literature and his life, and one about the killer of Martin Luther King) have one common point - Lisbon. Individually they are excellent, but the structure doesn’t feel as whole coherent novel, more as forced ... but it is absolutely an interesting blend of perspectives, genres and styles.
October 28, 2021
على أنغام جون كولترين ومايلز ديفيز, على إيقاعات الجّاز والبلوز. عُزِفَت هذه الرّواية.
أنطونيو مونيوث مولينا في تجلٍّ أدبي ممتع جدّاً. فعلى جانب، تبدو إيقاعات هرب جيمس إيرل راي، قاتل مارتن لوثر كينغ، قد استحوذت على هذا العمل، خلال رحلة طويلة في دماغ ووعي هذا القاتل؛ على الجانب الآخر من الرواية يسرد لنا مولينا محاولاته الأدبية ونظرته في هذا العالم السّاحر، وكيف حفرَ في وعي ذاته من أجل كتابة الروايات، وفي مقدمتها روايته الأشهر "الشتاء في لشبونة"، ومن ثم كيف ابتدع فكرة هذا العمل الأدبي الفذّ.
اخترت هذا المقطع من الرواية الذي كتبه مولينا عن أشياء جميلة لا يشعر بها إلا من استحوذ الأدب عليه رغم كل حياته.
"ربما لهذا فإن العالمين الوحيدين اللذين عثرت على نفسي فيهما حقاً هما الأدب والسينما، حيث يمكن لأيّ شيء أن يحدث وألّا يحدث؛ وحيث لا تسري القواعد الكريهة للحياة الفعلية؛ ففيهما لا تقتل الطلقات أحداً، قد تُفجّر المآسي فيهما الدموع لكنها لا تسبّب ألماً حقيقيّاً، بداية الحكايات نظيفة وواضحة كنهايتها، دون رواسب، كأنّها سجائر لا تسبّب السّرطان، لا تُخلّف وراءها رماداً، أو رائحة أنفاس سيّئة، بل مجرد سحب دخان حلزونيّة تطفو في الهواء بين شخصيّاتها، خيوطٌ تخرج من فم، لا هو مفتوح ولا مقفل، لامرأة مرغوبة ليس لها وجود، لكن يُفضّل أن تكون بالأبيض والأسود. شاهدت أفلاماً وقرأتُ كتباً لأختبئ فيها؛ لأتحرّر من دناءة الواقع، من رياء نفسي لنفسي، ومن جُبني. كانت الأفلام مع الأدب غذاء لحالة تَقَوقع تخلو من الاستبطان، كحال المراهقة."
أنطونيو مونيوث مولينا في تجلٍّ أدبي ممتع جدّاً. فعلى جانب، تبدو إيقاعات هرب جيمس إيرل راي، قاتل مارتن لوثر كينغ، قد استحوذت على هذا العمل، خلال رحلة طويلة في دماغ ووعي هذا القاتل؛ على الجانب الآخر من الرواية يسرد لنا مولينا محاولاته الأدبية ونظرته في هذا العالم السّاحر، وكيف حفرَ في وعي ذاته من أجل كتابة الروايات، وفي مقدمتها روايته الأشهر "الشتاء في لشبونة"، ومن ثم كيف ابتدع فكرة هذا العمل الأدبي الفذّ.
اخترت هذا المقطع من الرواية الذي كتبه مولينا عن أشياء جميلة لا يشعر بها إلا من استحوذ الأدب عليه رغم كل حياته.
"ربما لهذا فإن العالمين الوحيدين اللذين عثرت على نفسي فيهما حقاً هما الأدب والسينما، حيث يمكن لأيّ شيء أن يحدث وألّا يحدث؛ وحيث لا تسري القواعد الكريهة للحياة الفعلية؛ ففيهما لا تقتل الطلقات أحداً، قد تُفجّر المآسي فيهما الدموع لكنها لا تسبّب ألماً حقيقيّاً، بداية الحكايات نظيفة وواضحة كنهايتها، دون رواسب، كأنّها سجائر لا تسبّب السّرطان، لا تُخلّف وراءها رماداً، أو رائحة أنفاس سيّئة، بل مجرد سحب دخان حلزونيّة تطفو في الهواء بين شخصيّاتها، خيوطٌ تخرج من فم، لا هو مفتوح ولا مقفل، لامرأة مرغوبة ليس لها وجود، لكن يُفضّل أن تكون بالأبيض والأسود. شاهدت أفلاماً وقرأتُ كتباً لأختبئ فيها؛ لأتحرّر من دناءة الواقع، من رياء نفسي لنفسي، ومن جُبني. كانت الأفلام مع الأدب غذاء لحالة تَقَوقع تخلو من الاستبطان، كحال المراهقة."
January 27, 2015
Qué fácil es dejarse atrapar por el estilo fluido y cálido de Muñoz Molina, y qué fácil también habitar en la evocación de los escenarios a los que el autor vuelve de forma casi obsesiva en una obra que combina formas de novela, ensayo y autobiografía. Escribir, dice el autor, consiste en ponerse en la conciencia del otro, y esto es lo que hace Muñoz Molina de forma brillante y arriesgada al narrar la huida del asesino de Luther King, alternando esta voz con la suya propia. Me ha parecido una novela de estructura inacabada pero muy interesante, donde sobre todo domina la forma. La parte autobiográfica, que en algunas ocasiones se convierte en una confesión impúdica de remordimientos y hechos de su vida personal sobre los que siente la necesidad de confesión, también nos acercan a la experiencia personal del autor sobre la creación y la escritura, que vemos de inmediato plasmada en la narración de los hechos relativos a James Earl Ray. Una novela diferente y desde mi punto de vista muy recomendable.
August 9, 2016
Se lleva tres estrellas porque hay dos partes muy diferenciadas para mí en este libro. La parte que habla del asesino de Martin Luther King y los días que pasó fugado en Lisboa, y la parte en que Antonio Muñoz Molina viaja a Lisboa para escribir el que fue su primer gran éxito: "El invierno en Lisboa". También se ve la parte en que Muñoz Molina vuelve a Lisboa para escribir este mismo libro de "como la sombra que se va".
Pues bien, la parte "autobiográfica" en lo que a la vida como escritor de Muñoz Molina se refiere, me ha encantado, se hubiera llevado 5 estrellas. Sin embargo la parte en la que habla del asesino de Luther king, que fue lo que en primer término me hizo acercarme al libro, me ha resultado un poco tediosa, quizá porque está escrita de forma menos literaria, ciñéndose más a los informes del FBI y otros documentos históricos.
También me han resultado muy interesantes los últimos capítulos en los que se habla de Luther King en los días previos a su muerte.
Pues bien, la parte "autobiográfica" en lo que a la vida como escritor de Muñoz Molina se refiere, me ha encantado, se hubiera llevado 5 estrellas. Sin embargo la parte en la que habla del asesino de Luther king, que fue lo que en primer término me hizo acercarme al libro, me ha resultado un poco tediosa, quizá porque está escrita de forma menos literaria, ciñéndose más a los informes del FBI y otros documentos históricos.
También me han resultado muy interesantes los últimos capítulos en los que se habla de Luther King en los días previos a su muerte.
February 6, 2015
¿Cómo puede uno creer que se mantiene el interés a lo largo de tantas páginas viendo al asesino de Martin Luther King pasearse por el mundo? Es difícil encontrar un personaje menos interesante, pero si es que ni siquiera es malvado, es solo aburridísimo… Y esa reiteración constante de los mismos hechos y noticias de hemeroteca, avistamientos del criminal imaginados por todo el mundo, me aburro solo de recordarlo, no añade nada nuevo, solo lo hace todo más soporífero… es tan aburrido que te llegas a poner nervioso.
Se salva de la novela la descripción sobre los procesos de creación…
Y el ajuste de cuentas con su pasado sentimental…
Ah y uno de los mejores textos que he leído nunca sobre jazz…
Y el relato de su enamoramiento de Elvira Lindo…
Y, por supuesto, su dominio de la lengua. Es maravillosa su riqueza expresiva y de una precisión envidiable.
Pues al final tampoco era tan terrible…
July 27, 2018
LIKE A FADING SHADOW by Antonio MunozMolina (2014) translated from the Spanish by Camilo | Ramirez
Como la sombra que se va
“My days are like a fading shadow and I am withered like grass.” Psalms 102.11
This book was shortlisted for the Internationall Booker Prize 2018. It is beautifully written, and translated with great elegance. It’s not as difficult here as with some novels, labelled as autofiction, to distinguish the fictional elements from the memoir. They are kept separate. Mercifuly, we are not subjected to the minutiae of his daily life a la Knausgaard. Molina writes in the first person. He is the father of a toddler and a new born baby, is locked in a job he dislikes, and is about to embark on a novel set in Lisbon. His two desires are in conflict – the need to escape the restrictions of his present life and the aspiration he harbours in his heart to be a good father and husband, with the added awareness of leaving his wife to look after the children. Years later, he is intrigued by the escape of James Earl Ray, details of which have been released thanks to the declassification of the FBI files. On 4th April 1968, Ray murdered Martin Luther King. The plethora and minutiae of information about Ray, the people he met, including prostitutes, the hotels he visited, form the basis of chapters on Ray’s every move; they consist of lists, bare facts, and repetiton of how he would avoid eye contact; the testimony of those who came across him, however brief. In flight, Ray surrounds himself with a fiction of himself, while changing certain aspects of his appearance, without being able to change the unequal size of his ears. Even in prison, he continues to inhabit a constructed fiction by writing obsessively about “Raoul”, the other persona who committed the crime. Beneath it all, lies his hatred of black people, and memories of an impoverished, disaffected and drink-sodden family background.
In parallel is Molina’s quest as a writer. He writes beautifully about writing, and one chapter on Lisbon is so evocative of the place that it is a joy to read.
One of the final chapters is about M L King just before the murder. His doubts and disillusionment, his feelings of guilt, are woven through with passages from the Bible, before he rises up as a giant of purpose and conviction to address the people. Knowledge of what is to happen lends the mundane details of place and objects a certain poignancy and weight.
It’s as if - and I can only guess - Molina’s integrity demands restraint, or perhaps he finds himself constricted by the sheer abundance of information about his subject. On reflection, the puzzle still remains: why so much money, resources and manpower was deployed in the hunt and gathering of details on such a puny criminal. Ray poses the question from a different angle: why do they do this for a black man? It is certainly one of the anomalies that Molina will comment on later, pointing to the dichotomy of behaviour and attitude towards black people in the US.
Ultimately the writer in Molina will feel that he had a duty to his imagination – my memoir, he says, is mine. I can weave it in and let you decide.
Como la sombra que se va
“My days are like a fading shadow and I am withered like grass.” Psalms 102.11
This book was shortlisted for the Internationall Booker Prize 2018. It is beautifully written, and translated with great elegance. It’s not as difficult here as with some novels, labelled as autofiction, to distinguish the fictional elements from the memoir. They are kept separate. Mercifuly, we are not subjected to the minutiae of his daily life a la Knausgaard. Molina writes in the first person. He is the father of a toddler and a new born baby, is locked in a job he dislikes, and is about to embark on a novel set in Lisbon. His two desires are in conflict – the need to escape the restrictions of his present life and the aspiration he harbours in his heart to be a good father and husband, with the added awareness of leaving his wife to look after the children. Years later, he is intrigued by the escape of James Earl Ray, details of which have been released thanks to the declassification of the FBI files. On 4th April 1968, Ray murdered Martin Luther King. The plethora and minutiae of information about Ray, the people he met, including prostitutes, the hotels he visited, form the basis of chapters on Ray’s every move; they consist of lists, bare facts, and repetiton of how he would avoid eye contact; the testimony of those who came across him, however brief. In flight, Ray surrounds himself with a fiction of himself, while changing certain aspects of his appearance, without being able to change the unequal size of his ears. Even in prison, he continues to inhabit a constructed fiction by writing obsessively about “Raoul”, the other persona who committed the crime. Beneath it all, lies his hatred of black people, and memories of an impoverished, disaffected and drink-sodden family background.
In parallel is Molina’s quest as a writer. He writes beautifully about writing, and one chapter on Lisbon is so evocative of the place that it is a joy to read.
One of the final chapters is about M L King just before the murder. His doubts and disillusionment, his feelings of guilt, are woven through with passages from the Bible, before he rises up as a giant of purpose and conviction to address the people. Knowledge of what is to happen lends the mundane details of place and objects a certain poignancy and weight.
It’s as if - and I can only guess - Molina’s integrity demands restraint, or perhaps he finds himself constricted by the sheer abundance of information about his subject. On reflection, the puzzle still remains: why so much money, resources and manpower was deployed in the hunt and gathering of details on such a puny criminal. Ray poses the question from a different angle: why do they do this for a black man? It is certainly one of the anomalies that Molina will comment on later, pointing to the dichotomy of behaviour and attitude towards black people in the US.
Ultimately the writer in Molina will feel that he had a duty to his imagination – my memoir, he says, is mine. I can weave it in and let you decide.
October 14, 2020
So, this is more than one story. Oddly, the author's own story (about his experience writing his novel about Lisbon) was not nearly as interesting as the story about James Earl Ray, constructed from the historical record, plus the addition of recently released FBI material. I was just a little kid when MLK was assassinated, so I found all of the information about Ray's background and his personality disorders fascinating. I didn't even know that Ray had briefly hid out in Portugal.
At first, I was thrilled with the idea of the narrative as a modern work of metafiction, and at the beginning, the author seemed to merge inside of the head of Ray, emoting fully: sensing light, shadow, heat, texture, fear, anxiety, and sound. That was pretty compelling, But, from there, it was as if the author didn't trust himself to continue that subjective path, or just plain didn't want to, but either way, the side by side stories as a structural motif just didn't work. There was so little to tie them together in even the most cursory of ways, and the author's own self-assessment is bafflingly off-putting, as if he thought he deserved little sympathy? Maybe that is one parallel, then.
Maybe read this as a singularly focused bio of James Earl Ray, and skip the other chapters, unless you want to know even the most sentimental, schmaltzy and boring details which drove the author to write his Lisbon novel. I apologize if that comes off as harsh. I'm usually generous, but this time, No.
At first, I was thrilled with the idea of the narrative as a modern work of metafiction, and at the beginning, the author seemed to merge inside of the head of Ray, emoting fully: sensing light, shadow, heat, texture, fear, anxiety, and sound. That was pretty compelling, But, from there, it was as if the author didn't trust himself to continue that subjective path, or just plain didn't want to, but either way, the side by side stories as a structural motif just didn't work. There was so little to tie them together in even the most cursory of ways, and the author's own self-assessment is bafflingly off-putting, as if he thought he deserved little sympathy? Maybe that is one parallel, then.
Maybe read this as a singularly focused bio of James Earl Ray, and skip the other chapters, unless you want to know even the most sentimental, schmaltzy and boring details which drove the author to write his Lisbon novel. I apologize if that comes off as harsh. I'm usually generous, but this time, No.
Shelved as 'tasted'
March 24, 2020The structural decision to have very different alternating chapters usually makes a novel unbalanced. That is, one half is better than the other (although readers may disagree which one is better). This can work, or it can’t. In this case, it didn’t work for me.
The third-person chapters on the unnamed James Earl Ray, who murdered Martin Luther King, Jr., interested me (not topically) much less than the first-person chapters about an unnamed writer. It should have been the other way around, and that is, I suppose, what made me finally put the book down short of 200 pages. I started skimming the Ray chapters and then, soon after, I lost interest in the writer chapters. But I highly recommend the author's Sepharad.
The third-person chapters on the unnamed James Earl Ray, who murdered Martin Luther King, Jr., interested me (not topically) much less than the first-person chapters about an unnamed writer. It should have been the other way around, and that is, I suppose, what made me finally put the book down short of 200 pages. I started skimming the Ray chapters and then, soon after, I lost interest in the writer chapters. But I highly recommend the author's Sepharad.
August 22, 2024
La novela "Cuando la sombra que se va" de Antonio Muñoz Molina está escrita de manera excelente y ofrece detalles profundos sobre el asesinato de Martin Luther King, lo que demuestra el gran trabajo de documentación e investigación del autor. Sin embargo, aunque he disfrutado de muchos momentos del libro, en otros se me ha hecho tedioso. Algunas partes y detalles de la vida de Antonio Muñoz Molina, que se entremezclan con la trama, me parecen superfluos y fuera de lugar; siento que el autor ocupa demasiado espacio en la novela. El ritmo es lento y, a veces, el gusto por el preciosismo en los mínimos detalles puede resultar cansado. En resumen, es una novela bien escrita, pero requiere paciencia y tranquilidad para leerla, ya que tiene momentos brillantes mezclados con partes que, desde mi punto de vista, sobran. Le doy una calificación de 3.5.
May 26, 2018
Probablemente esta sea una de las obras de narrativa más sincera, obsesiva y visceral que se haya publicado en castellano en los últimos tiempo.
100% Muñoz Molina. 100% narrativa de calidad y de altura.
http://libros-y-cine-nada-mas.blogspo...
100% Muñoz Molina. 100% narrativa de calidad y de altura.
http://libros-y-cine-nada-mas.blogspo...
Shelved as 'did-not-finish'
August 11, 2018I might go back to this one, but at this point the book holds no interest for me whatsoever.
Shelved as 'bitiremediklerim'
January 14, 2024Çok iyi bir romandır belki de. Bana hitap etmiyor. Tıka basa eşya doldurulmuş eve benziyor. İki kelimeyle anlatılacak bir durumu yaklaşık altmış yetmiş kelimeyle anlatan çok büyük cümleler, çok fazla kelime... Var ben yorulmak.
May 28, 2018
In 1968, James Earl Ray evaded the authorities after shooting Martin Luther King Jr. by using a fake passport and making his way to Portugal. During his last days of freedom, he wanders around Lisbon rehearsing his fake identities. In Like a Fading Shadow, Antonio Muñoz Molina reconstructs Ray’s final days, but it is also a meditation on the city that also inspired his first novel A Winter in Lisbon. Turning this into a blend of historical fiction and memoir, Muñoz Molina’s tries to weave his own experiences in with that of a man on the FBI’s Most Wanted list.
Everything about this novel sounded so appealing from the premise but reading it was so difficult. First of all, I thought the idea of having the James Earl Ray narrative interwoven with that of Antonio Muñoz Molina’s did not work as well as the author might have hoped. In hindsight, it would have been better to just read A Winter in Lisbon and then search the internet about Earl Ray’s final days. Secondly, I felt like this book kept going in circles and never really progressing in any satisfactory way. Which is disappointing because I think this was one of the books on the Man Booker International Prize longlist that I was excited to read.
This is so disappointing, the idea to make a fictionalised account of what might have happened when James Earl Ray was in Portugal sounds amazing. I was fascinated that he was able to sneak across the border to Canada and use a fake passport to get to London and eventually make it all the way to Lisbon. He spent his time trying to get to Angola, which alone would have made for an interesting narrative; why is a pro-white supremacist trying to get to Africa? Then you have this memoir-like narrative of Antonio Muñoz Molina trying to write his first novel, A Winter in Lisbon. Separately this could be stimulating to explore the writer’s process and the emotions behind creating a novel. However, as a combination it ended up to be too little of each and together it never came together.
The Man Booker International Prize longlist has been focusing on narratives the blend fiction and non-fiction and I can see why this book was picked but I do not see the appeal for it to make the shortlist. I wanted to love this book; I went in with high expectations but I ended up struggling through this. Between this and The Imposters (which is very similar in many ways) I almost found myself in a reading slump. Thankfully Flights by Olga Tokarczuk was there to save me.
This review originally appeared on the blog; http://www.knowledgelost.org/book-rev...
Everything about this novel sounded so appealing from the premise but reading it was so difficult. First of all, I thought the idea of having the James Earl Ray narrative interwoven with that of Antonio Muñoz Molina’s did not work as well as the author might have hoped. In hindsight, it would have been better to just read A Winter in Lisbon and then search the internet about Earl Ray’s final days. Secondly, I felt like this book kept going in circles and never really progressing in any satisfactory way. Which is disappointing because I think this was one of the books on the Man Booker International Prize longlist that I was excited to read.
This is so disappointing, the idea to make a fictionalised account of what might have happened when James Earl Ray was in Portugal sounds amazing. I was fascinated that he was able to sneak across the border to Canada and use a fake passport to get to London and eventually make it all the way to Lisbon. He spent his time trying to get to Angola, which alone would have made for an interesting narrative; why is a pro-white supremacist trying to get to Africa? Then you have this memoir-like narrative of Antonio Muñoz Molina trying to write his first novel, A Winter in Lisbon. Separately this could be stimulating to explore the writer’s process and the emotions behind creating a novel. However, as a combination it ended up to be too little of each and together it never came together.
The Man Booker International Prize longlist has been focusing on narratives the blend fiction and non-fiction and I can see why this book was picked but I do not see the appeal for it to make the shortlist. I wanted to love this book; I went in with high expectations but I ended up struggling through this. Between this and The Imposters (which is very similar in many ways) I almost found myself in a reading slump. Thankfully Flights by Olga Tokarczuk was there to save me.
This review originally appeared on the blog; http://www.knowledgelost.org/book-rev...
July 18, 2015
One of the most original and thought-provoking books I've ever read, which weaves together A) the flight from justice by James Earl Ray following the assassination of Martin Luther King, and B) the author's own experiences in Lisbon, one of the cities where Ray spent time before he was eventually captured. I look forward to the publication of the English translation, as I want to hear what my non-Spanish-speaking amigos have to say about this book. Seriously, one of the best books I've ever read, though it's so different from everything else out there that I'm not sure how people will respond to it.
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