Author: Antonio Muñoz Molina
Title: Como la sombra que se va
Year: 2014
My rating: 3,8 out of 6
This novel will most certainly get translated into English because Muñoz Molina is one of the greatest living writers in Spain. He has been awarded a bizillion prizes and sold millions of copies of his novels. His most recent one, however, is not a novel I would recommend to anybody.
The writer’s penultimate book, Everything Solid, was an essay on the current economic crisis in Spain where Muñoz Molina condemned writers who write about history for their escapism. Given that he is famous precisely for writing beautifully about history, it was a little bizarre to see him bash and slash writers who are interested in history. It was even more bizarre to find out that right after publishing the essay, Muñoz Molina started a novel about. . . history.
His new novel is about the murderer of Martin Luther King Jr. I’ve got to tell you, folks, I love this writer, I read everything he publishes, but I have no idea what the heck he was hoping to achieve in this novel. I’m trying to avoid reaching the conclusion that the novel was written to feed off the attention the anniversary of Selma is getting and ensure that the novel will get translated into English.
In the novel, Martin Luther King is a broken, confused, pathetic man who is hoping that somebody would put an end to the misery of an existence dedicated to saying things he doesn’t even believe in. King’s assassin kind of starts evoking compassion by the end of the very long novel.
The writing is, as always, beautiful, but the novel is way too long and would easily stand to lose at least 150 pages.
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