Muñoz Molina up in his last novel two themes running through all his work: the memory of modern times and the infinite complexity of people. He signed with "In the great ancient times" one of his best books. They mix it, in beautiful pages, amorous passions of a man and the horror of Madrid destitute, abandoned and prey to the convulsions of civil war. In a train speeding through the United States, Ignacio Abel, exiled son of a bricklayer and a concierge, renowned Spanish architect, progressive, republican, man wall and very bourgeois married, father of two children and unfaithful husband , remember. He remembers the few months of his consuming passion for a young American, Judith Biely, who accompanied the entry of Spain into the long dark night of the Franco dictatorship.
With an eye for detail and an incredible art of prodigious complexity, Antonio Muñoz Molina recounts the months that preceded the entry of the fascist hordes in Madrid. The narrator, in the very first pages of the novel, describes a tired Abel Ignacio upstairs to Pennsylvania Station in New York. The narrator also of the author's clothes. It looks at the photo of the architect on the station steps. He looks, wonders, sees the look on the train that will lead him to the University of Reinheberg the banks of the Hudson. This introduction mixes with great know-how to work the writer and the story in progress. It also combines with great finesse and with deliberate slowness in the past of the main character and present of his exile. Abel Ignacio hears voices, obsessively seeking a beloved face. No less than eight hundred and fifty pages teeming be necessary to recount, in an amazing back and forth in time, stories of capital transformed into a huge mass grave and - amid violence, arrests, executions or 'attacks - the wanderings of the hero. The author tracks down every detail. The many buildings and scrupulous descriptions, rich or poor neighborhoods, streets nauseous or without bread suburbs, sunburned contribute to the great density of the story. Fictional characters, many and "consistent" unite their destinies to those of politicians and writers of the time. Abel Ignacio talks with Negrin, one of the historic figures of Spain, he dreams with Bergamin or Moreno Villa of a country that would overcome poverty and illiteracy. Neither saints nor bastards, beings encountered are steeped in contradictions. Far from the simplistic manichéismes who usually oppose democratic and reactionary hero and coward, husband and lover, bourgeois and proletarian, black and red this novel - which, however, does not confuse republic and dictatorship - deep into the waves of the ongoing civil war.
The second fiddle for modulating the words of the author. In-laws Ignacio Abel is not that bourgeois, reactionary and Catholic. While the brother-without scale, is pitiful in his uniform of the phalanx but the father-richest man in the right, is not limited to this caricature. The torque of Ignacio and Judith seems to be a necessary counterbalance to fool kitsch of Madrid's bourgeoisie and Catholicism stuffy family. But the long letter Adela, reread intermittently, offers, italic, another point of view that does justice to the woman deceived. The space here to tell also the complexity of the anti hero who, faced with the violence of revolutionary groups and the pusillanimity of the republican government fled his family and his country. There are beautiful moments which speaks of the father, the lover, activist, artist ... Ignacio Abel does not try to save his old master of the Bauhaus?
The Muñoz Molina's novel force does not fit in a more conventional novel. Writing, very well translated, is of unimaginable density, complexity of extraordinaire.Le book is full of modernity and originality. Full of originality is not simply reveals the opposite of literature writers. If the novel plays with flashbacks, it is usually oscillating, changing perspective and sometimes even stopping net. The narrator, in the very last pages of the novel, uses the future, and thus "In the great dawn of time" is not, by the magic of writing, a story of love and commitment that simply would end ...
