Sepharad - Hardcover

Molina, Antonio Munoz

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0151009015 ISBN 13: 9780151009015

Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2003

Synopsis

A stunning, richly textured novel integrates the Sephardic diaspora, the Holocaust, and Stalin's purges as it moves from past to present to capture the lives of a variety of both real and fictional characters as they deal with suffering, separation, love, and waiting. 15,000 first printing.

About this title

Review:

"Beautifully constructed and very rich."

"A brilliant, fearful, and unforgettable book."

"Munoz Molina writes the novels of the people he's met and imagined, gleaning from the names he encounters stories that vibrate beneath the burden of history, that lift with the breath of human life."

"This book is no boneless 'meditation'; it has all the onward rush and effortfulness of an epic, and it's studded with the terrible stories you hear from acquaintances in 'the insomniac world of travelers.'"

"Beautifully constructed and very rich."
"A brilliant, fearful, and unforgettable book."
"Obsessive in its detail, inspiring in its scope and monumental in its ambitions...smart and insightful...intellectually demanding..."
"This is the land of the marked, the fated, the terminally ill, and we should be grateful that Munoz Molina is our brave guide in this world."
"Will intrigue and enthrall determined readers willing to let this thoughtful writer lead them through history into the hearts of exiles at home and abroad."
"Now that American readers have the opportunity to encounter Molina, we may want to adopt him as our own...Together his sketches comprise a harrowing sketch of private life in the 20th century."

From the Back Cover:

"Moving and astonishing." -- Richard Eder, The New York Times

From one of Spain's most celebrated writers comes an extraordinary book that draws on the Sephardic diaspora, the Holocaust, and Stalin's purges to tell a twentieth-century story. Shifting seamlessly from the past to the present and following the routes of escape across countries and continents, Antonio Muñoz Molina evokes people real and imagined who come together in a richly allusive pattern?from Eugenia Ginzburg to Grete Buber-Neumann, the one on a train to the gulag, the other heading toward a Nazi concentration camp; from a shoemaker and a nun who become lovers in a small Spanish town to Primo Levi bound for Auschwitz. From the well known to the virtually unknown?all of Molina's characters are voices of separation, nostalgia, love, and endless waiting.

?Shame and guilt, homelands and exile, ceaseless wanderings and bitter alienations both internal and external, metaphorical and real, are persistent motifs of Muñoz Molina's remarkable novel--one that turns out to be about a territory far vaster than Sepharad itself: Europe, perhaps even the world . . . A masterpiece." -- Daniel Mendelsohn, The New York Review of Books

"Muñoz Molina writes the novels of the people he's met and imagined, gleaning from the names he encounters stories that vibrate beneath the burden of history, that lift with the breath of human life." ?Los Angeles Times Book Review

 

ANTONIO MUÑOZ MOLINA has twice been awarded the Premio Nacional de Literatura in Spain in addition to winning the Prix Femina in France. He lives in Madrid and New York.

 

About this edition

• Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
• Publication date: 2003
• ISBN 10: 0151009015
• ISBN 13: 9780151009015
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 448