Antonio Munoz Molina in the NY Sun

Thankfully, Antonio Munoz Molina’s In Her Absence has been getting at least some good attention. Jon Welch, buyer at Talking Leaves, mentioned this book in glowing terms to me a few weeks ago, and today’s review in the NY Sun—the bastion of excellent reviews of international fiction—makes it sound really interesting.

In Her Absence concerns a provincial Spanish bureaucrat named Mario López who has married, well out of his league, a beautiful woman for whom he could not be more poorly suited. Because Mario remains infatuated to the point of obsession with his wife, he must regularly engage in grueling mental gymnastics to a) convince himself that the marriage has any chance whatsoever of survival, b) not resent the relative tepidity of her feelings for him, and c) not break his mind as a result of the psychological contortions required for a) and b).

For the past few years, Antonio Munoz Molina was the head of the Instituto Cervantes in New York, and did a fantastic job attracting people to the Institute (which is an absolutely amazing space) and getting them excited about Spanish literature. (I think it was the first year of the PEN World Voices festival that they were turning people away from a panel on Cervantes.)

And as part of my mission to spread unfounded rumors and literary gossip, I once heard that he accepted the post because America is the only country where people don’t recognize him and stop him in the streets to talk about his books. Great backhanded compliments, and well, yes, we generally suck and don’t appreciate writers. Especially not foreign ones.

Anyway, Munoz Molina has written a number of books (see his Wikipedia page for some fairly reliable info) and with In Her Absence getting some attention, and ithe paperback version of Sepharad is coming out this fall from Harvest Books in the ever-so-popular $21 print-on-demand version, maybe he’ll finally start to find his American audience.