Plaza Santa Ana, a place where a young American rents a room, living beside washerwomen and labourers The smell of homemade food wafts its way up to her third floor apartment. Caldos, or sopas, tomato based, heavy on the pimenton, earthy flavours which make the most of the leftovers from the day before the day before. Down the road, on Alcala, just off Sol, a politician sits in a bar and consumes vast quantities of prawns and beer. The city hums with a life which reflects the way the capital has become a pole star, integrating every corner of the country, Andaluz, Asturian, Catalan, Galician and so on and so forth. It’s a far cry from the Santa Ana and Calle Alcala of today. Today, Santa Ana is full of dainty restaurants with prices geared towards the tourists. Sol is a catch-all, gaudy to the point of ugliness. As such, Molina’s novel, which is about many things, feels like a lament for a lost Spain, a Madrid which has been appropriated by the tourist dollar. The first time I ever visited Madrid, it still had a provincial feel; a town for insiders, full of secrets. Now, its secrets have been cast to the wind and it bustles with the energy of a modern, global capital.
The novel captures Madrid on the eve of the Civil War. It’s framed around the affair conducted by its protagonist, Ignacio Abel, with Judith, a youngish American who is falling in love with him and Madrid. The novel has a double focus. On the one hand it’s a brilliant portrayal of a city which is teetering on the brink of disaster. Day by day, as the affair unfolds, the city steps closer and closer to the abyss, never realising where it will end until it’s too late. Molina details this process immaculately. The reader feels as though they are entering the vortex alongside the characters, many of whom will meet, we know, a tragic end. Hindsight is the novelist’s great weapon, and Molina wields it like a fencing sword. At one point he writes: “How strange to imagine with such clarity what I haven’t lived, what happened more than seventy years ago.” That strangeness is communicated to the reader, looking on in horror as the net closes. For an English reader in these times, the novel is more than disconcerting, it’s positively scary.
The secondary focus of the novel is the affair. This too is detailed meticulously. Every step of Judith and Ignacio’s voyage is mapped. The novel itself is framed around Ignacio’s voyage from Penn Station to Rhineland, the university town on the Hudson where he has been commissioned to design a library, (his ticket out of Spain). At the end of this journey, he will meet Judith once again. The novelist never seeks to place his protagonist in a sympathetic light: he’s not merely fleeing Spain, he’s also running away from his family. There’s a coldness to Ignacio which perhaps goes with his chosen profession, a coldness which Judith succeeds in melting. At times it’s hard not to question Ignacio and by implication the author himself. if there’s any part of this novel which felt less than satisfactory to this reader it was the last twenty five pages, which might be said to allow Ignacio to have his cake and eat it.
Nevertheless, this last section cannot take the shine off a novel which succeeds brilliantly in conjuring up the lost world of pre-Civil War Spain, capturing in the process the way in which families and communities were rent asunder. At one point in the novel there’s a barbed reference to Hemingway and the other foreign writers who passed through Spain during the Civil War. In non-Spanish speaking countries, our understanding of that conflict is very much shaped by an outsider’s perspective. Here, in a fine translation by Edith Grossman, Molina recalibrates that, offering a compelling, evocative portrayal of a land teetering on the brink.
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