Sepharad - Softcover

Molina, Antonio Munoz

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0156034743 ISBN 13: 9780156034746

Publisher: Houghton Mifflin, 2008

Synopsis

From one of Spain's most celebrated writers, an extraordinary, inspired book--at once fiction, history, and memoir--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, Munoz Molina evokes people real and imagined who come together in a richly allusive pattern--from Eugenia Ginsburg 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.
Written with clarity of vision and passion, in a style both lyrical and accessible, Sepharad makes the experience our own.
A brilliant achievement.

About this title

Review:

"A brilliant, fearful, and unforgettable book."

"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."

"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."

"Beautifully constructed and very rich."
"Obsessive in its detail, inspiring in its scope and monumental in its ambitions...smart and insightful...intellectually demanding..."
"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.''"
"Elegiacally beautiful...Calling on such inspiring figures as Franz Kafka and Primo Levi for guidance. Munoz Molina creates astute, deeply felt, and exquisitely expressive testimony to love, suffering, and the astonishing fecundity of human consciousness."
"One might argue against such a literary appropriation of the Holocaust, yet Munoz Molina''s urgent desire to bear witness to it, even though at a remove, and his very sensitive ability to evoke the humiliations of its victims makes Sepharad an amazing book. The Margaret Sayers Peden translation is excellent. Read it."

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
• Publication date: 2008
• ISBN 10: 0156034743
• ISBN 13: 9780156034746
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 400