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5.0étoiles sur 5
A Dark Eulogy for the Displaced, Mai 9 2004
SEPHARAD (the Hebrew word for "Spain") is both fiction and nonfiction, a novel, a memoir, a history book and a eulogy for all the Jews who either had to flee Spain or were removed forcibly. It's a eulogy for people who have been displaced and, as someone who has lived away from my home country for many years now, I could identify with some of the pain these narrators were feeling. (Not all, of course, since visits to my home country are still possible.)SEPHARAD has several narrators, but it's primary one is a shadowy leukemia patient whose life consists of books and memories. One of his greatest regrets is the fact that his children and their children will never know the Spain of his own childhood, a Spain that was very different from the one we know today and, one that contained many Jews. SEPHARAD begins in Madrid, with a train journey taken by the primary narrator, but it quickly shifts its focus and its narrator, to include all of Europe, both past and present. The use of multiple narrators, a shifting from the first to the third person and shifting time periods is, I think, SEPHARAD's greatest strength. I think it was wonderful for Munoz Molina to entwine his fiction with real life stories and memories, and he seems to have the extreme narrative control required to pull off this difficult balancing act with graceful and seamless transitions. SEPHARAD isn't a novel as much as it's a collection of loosely joined memories, shared stories and recollections. The thread connecting these narratives is an ephemeral one, but they do all revolve around the theme of displacement, mostly displacement due to the Holocaust or the Spanish Civil War. Surprisingly, for a book written by one of modern day Spain's greatest authors, there are many recollections of Germans in SEPHARAD, especially Germans who resisted Hitler and were eventually punished for that resistance. The images in SEPHARAD are dark and they revolve around people being led away in the middle of the night, never to be seen again; Spanish refugees awaiting their fate on the beaches at the end of the Spanish Civil War; train journeys that end in the gulag. These are people who have lost their identity and despair of ever finding a new one or returning to the one they once owned. They are people living in limbo, simply doing nothing more than awaiting death. They are people who will never see their families again and who will probably die a pauper's death and be buried in an unmarked grave, as if they had never existed. I loved almost all of SEPHARAD, but I didn't really like the end. Munoz Molina catapults us from his melancholy, pensive intertwining of narratives ten years into the future in New York City. For me, this changed the "mood" of the book and it was a change I didn't really like. I can't, however, call it a criticism, because this may just be personal preference. Other readers might like this ending or even prefer it. SEPHARAD is an amazing, highly literary book and one I really can't say enough about. I've never read anything like it, but I hope to read more of Munoz Molina's work in the future. SEPHARAD is a book that is extraordinarily thought provoking and causes a sensitive reader to ask many questions...all of them revolving around the nature of identity, displacement, trust and, of course, memory. I would definitely recommend SEPHARAD to intelligent readers of highly literary fiction. In fact, for those readers, SEPHARAD is a book that simply can't be missed. Readers looking for something light and entertaining should stay away, however. SEPHARAD, more than any book I've ever read, has left an indelible imprint in my memory.
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