In an interview with INFORMACIÓN newspaper a few weeks ago, when asked why his latest novel is a genre, the two Pulitzer Prize winners replied that there are only two kinds of literature, that works and that doesn’t. It is true that this statement can qualify, but this shows that genre novels are viewed by many as minor works. I definitely don’t think so. The proof is in Antonio Muñoz Molina’s El invierno en Lisboa (Planeta, 1987; Booket, 2016).
Some events unfold in a spiral, with a character narrator telling us a story that isn’t his (“He had a story and he had a gun!” p. 18) and a completely unobjective first-person witness. endings are always confused with beginnings and vice versa. This narrator speaks for the protagonist, always taking the plot from a bar in Madrid or a bar in San Sebastián, a hotel in Madrid or a bar in Lisbon, a house in Berlin or a house in Lisbon. with a decor that recreates the mottled atmosphere of a cocktail bar, jazz and night: “The abuse of solitude and cold beer has led me to indiscriminate lighting” (p.13); It is the emotion that is reflected to the characters, who are shown as trapped and trapped in a temporary place whose past we do not know, although it is assumed that they are not reflected in the future.
This novel anchored my literary biography at one of the most amusing moments of detective fiction, for in the late eighties politics and the revision of the Spanish civil war were unchanging themes in the cultural landscape of Europe. Spain at the time, so such a story with all the components of the genre surprised me, and I must admit that over the years, I have revisited this story, which has always been referred to by the metaphor of the title.
The story is the story of jazz musician Biralbo, who falls in love with Lucrecia, who is married to an American art smuggler, after a Cézanne painting is stolen in the plot. However, as in this type of work, the central core is none other than impossible love, the love that cannot be explained, in which the characters seem to have no past and of course, no future, and in which their relationship is involved. There cannot be an explanation. Like everything important in the novel, it is remembered in tobacco smoke, jazz, at night, in the most traditional underworld of the art dealers, with its violent henchmen, everything wrapped in a gift. two moments in the past, the moment the narrator meets Biralbo, and three years later, the moment when the transcript of the alleged robbery integrates perfectly with the narrative development of the work.
I love these black-out-of-grey stories, mostly because I’m outside the plot, not identifying with anything or anyone, and enjoying the distance established between what the author wrote and what I wrote. read, but always with the value of truth. It’s an experience I’ve always appreciated because I like to savor the necessary linguistic alienation that the genre requires, but that reaches such a high dose of literary that Muñoz Molina wrote this novel.
And why should you read this novel? As it is a multiple symbol of Spanish literature, primarily because it was a key work in the career of an author who became the cornerstone of authorship in Spain; because it is a dark novel from start to finish, and moreover, in these moments when everything is fluid; And because, and that’s always the most important thing, it’s consistent, honest, and kind, one enjoys reading something of the black genre.