About the subtleties of the past. It’s about the secret abysses that characters hide in an unmanageable present. It is about the relationship of past and present to an uncertain and unstable future that cannot be. It’s about young love. It’s about nostalgia that corrodes everything. It’s about the history of a country shrouded in the gray color of an eternal dictatorship. About the wonder of prepared sentences. About the impossibility of regaining lost time. About academic life in American universities. About classical music and especially the figure of Pau Casals. On the urgent need to leave Spain and breathe less harmful air in the USA, the land of opportunity: “I didn’t know that I was learning to be a foreigner, not an American.” It’s about lasting friendship. And about sick death as the horizon of an impossible expectation.
With all these mischiefs, halfway between memory and history, the collective and the private, Antonio Muñoz Molina (Úbeda, 1956) publishes I will not see you die, a fiction mixed with some elements that characterize all his works as “They”. His insistence on referencing a past that must be told and always imagined with the confidence of himself and others is a narrative structure that is as clearly realistic as it is sincere, and in many cases is suggestive. Personal experiences, both personal and historical, filtered through the flow of time, and extremely powerful expressions that surround the reader with an architecturally perfect narrative structure.
With a magnificent sentence that occupies the first 73 pages at the opening of the book, it is a sentence that can confuse the past, present and future, as if it were ambiguity that manages to dazzle the reader, and is convoluted enough to do this. Muñoz Molina begins the story between bank manager Gabriel Aristu and plastics professor Adriana Zuber: “If I’m here and I see you and talk to you, it must be a dream.” art whose love story is suddenly left unfinished. Forty-seven years later they meet again, but now they are in very different situations because time has already taken its toll on both of them: Constance, who is married to Constance, and Fanny, who is at the end of her life but is pursued by poison. It is a story of a terminal illness that relates to the novel’s title and reproduces a line written by the Uruguayan Idea Vilariño for Juan Carlos Onetti: “I won’t touch you again. / I won’t see you die.” Only in Gabriel’s persistent dreams were they able to have the desired union, which they could not have because “things come when they are no longer desired”, as he confesses to Adriana. Apparently not wanting them is a prerequisite for them not coming.
Everything in this twilight novel is best reminiscent of Muñoz Molina, because it demonstrates the knowledge of a writer who can convey to the reader the chiaroscuro of intimate life in which the main and secondary characters take part. that they could use their own methods to rebuild their own lives, and that in the case of the protagonists, they could have been very different if Gabriel had stayed or if Adriana had gone to the United States with him. Gabriel’s trip to America opened to him the congratulations of a life away. He survived the difficulties his father wanted so badly to avoid, but it turned him into a very different person than he would have been if they had lived together: «When Adriana walked away from Zuber, what she walked away from was herself, the best possibilities within her. It’s not that he betrayed her or forgot about her. Away from him, she had stopped being the person she was; Thanks to his passionate and clear influence, he had destroyed the life that belonged to him, the identity that crystallized only through contact with him. He didn’t pretend to be someone else with American theater in order to spend a full life away from her, in another country and in another language; Separated from him, he had become another person, without need for hypocrisy, with complete faith, intoxicated with the urges of vanity and money, with the feeling of power, with the intoxication of social progress.
And, of course, there is that awe, the effect of close presence at distant distances cut short by history, an awe that Muñoz Molina brutally describes through a writing that stops everything that evokes absence, forgotten memories, the desired and desired figure of first love, the words that cannot be said in the moment and now, in the last encounter that was neither evasive nor lonely, they reproach each other as if everyday life was all over. to win. This is the irreparable combination of vulnerable lives who cannot change the world or turn back time because they know that what they no longer have is precisely time. So Gabriel can only connect with himself and remember what is not there: “Perhaps now it was enough to summon him, unaware of reality, saved from oblivion, with the same meticulousness with which he silently revives when alone, from belated cello phrases. Imaginary and real spaces are different, so much so that anchored in the privacy of both The wheel of time creates the effect of an evening scene: “They were like two old friends leaning over a photo album.”
And yes, of course, when Muñoz Molina seems to have reached the peak of his career, he dazzles everyone once again, enjoying and taking the time to write the hypnotic eighth notes of a written audio novel in a delicious note. It offers a magnificent book to be re-read slowly, wise with its serenity, serene with its wisdom, hitting the reader in the face and dragging it into an unforgettable whirlwind of emotions for a long time.