Book Review: 'A Manuscript of Ashes' by Antonio Munoz Molina

Antonio Muñoz Molina (1956)
A Manuscript of Ashes (1986)

305 pages

This early novel by Antonio Muñoz Molina takes place on a single day in 1969, though much of it is told in flashbacks and remembrances of the various characters.

Central to the novel is the psychological destruction caused by the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939) and the darkness and fear of the early years of the Franco regime (1939-1974). Much of the actual 'action' in the novel takes place in two periods, one during the civil war, and the second over several months in 1947.

Just a half-dozen active characters, and another half-dozen or so 'off-stage', are enough to show how the years of the 2^nd Spanish Republic (1931-1936), the civil war and the post-war Franco regime divided families, served as an excuse to resolve old grievances and, in the process, destroyed many lives. Family members who cross class boundaries are despised by those who don't, who in turn stew in the toxic effects of their hatred. Those who fight for what they believe in die at the hands of their enemies, and those who try to remain apolitical and outside the conflict die simply for being at the wrong place at the wrong time.

The novel itself plays out as a kind of mystery: Minaya, a young man in Madrid who feels (it is never clear if justifiably, or out of paranoia) that the security forces are closing in on him, flees to his family's home town on the Guadalquivir river in southern Spain. His parents long dead, he stays with his well-to-do uncle, using as pretense that he is interested in writing a dissertation about a poet, Jacinto Solana, who had been a close friend of his uncle's. Solana had introduced the uncle to his friend Mariana, and the two had eventually married, with Mariana being shot and killed, in an apparent accident, in the early morning hours of her wedding night. What begins for Minaya as a cover story for his stay with the uncle gradually grows into an obsession with his uncles past, as he tries to unravel the truth of a story complicated by the animosity between family members and the unwillingness of anyone to re-awaken the ghosts of a past in which every one feels in some way guilty of the part they played.

The story is very much like a puzzle, and from the first pages the reader is left feeling that some key pieces are missing. The final puzzle pieces only fall into place at the very end, as the complete picture reveals itself. Beyond the enjoyment of reading it as a mystery, the novel gives a fascinating look at the confusion, hatred and violence of the years around and during the Spanish Civil War.

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Other reviews / information:
Colin Fleming, in The New York Times

Adam Kirsch, in The New York Sun