MixedThe New Yorker... a deft translation ... Billed as a kind of homage to flânerie, the book reads more like a cautionary tale about the endangerment of the art of idle walking ... These excursions into literary history lend the proceedings a certain gravitas, but they also highlight the relative monotony of the narrator’s own wanderings ... The use of fragments is not uncommon among flâneurs, but Muñoz Molina’s set pieces read as mere compilations of visual and sonic data, with no thread looping through them, no enigma being circled. Bleichmar, the translator, is meticulous in his attention to the rhythms of the author’s Spanish. The voice of the narrator does not call to mind any of the book’s literary heroes, nor does it evoke more recent literary flâneurs, such as Amit Chaudhuri, Rebecca Solnit, and Teju Cole. Rather, he sounds like a character in a novel by Don DeLillo ... The autumnal melancholy one expects in a solitary rambler is instead a wintry misanthropy, leading not to observational insight but to sneers ... The most captivating moments in To Walk Alone in the Crowd come when the narrator lets memories seep through the barrage of pushy advertisements and pleading headlines ... there is a frustrating terseness to his historical musings, and a lot of tour-guide trivia ... Rather than gaining the depth of perspective that the past provides, To Walk Alone in the Crowd seems to cave in to the present, mimicking its superficiality and self-importance, channelling its short attention span and its addiction to topicality ... There may be a tacit critique in this approach: have big cities across the globe become products, too, soulless and interchangeable? Still, there is something self-defeating in an homage to flânerie that offers little sense of place ... What is really missing, though, is humanity—or specific, ordinary instances of it. Muñoz Molina’s narrator embodies the detachment of the flâneur but not his capacity for empathy. He tries to be \'all eyes and ears.\' This is a different goal than, as Woolf has it, briefly inhabiting \'the bodies and minds of others.\'
Guido Morselli
PositiveThe New YorkerDissipatio H.G. despite its fanciful premise, may be Morselli’s most autobiographical book: the erudite and neurotically self-aware narrator, a former newspaperman who has left the world behind to write in solitude, is essentially an alter ego ... There are hints that something fantastical has occurred, perhaps connected with the storm that began while the narrator was in the cave. But his investigations into what actually took place are quickly dropped in favor of descriptions of the landscape and reflections on Durkheim, Pascal, and Hegel, among others ... Typically, stories about the near-extinction of humanity dramatize the process of decay, with lessons on the fragility of civilization, and how easily a sense of community is shattered when people become desperate ... But Morselli forgoes the drama of depopulation, reducing the genre’s basic premise to its essence and its aftermath. His protagonist is not someone who cherishes social relations but a loner who has long since social-distanced, and flirted with self-annihilation. Given the narrator’s—and Morselli’s—views on contemporary society and its endless efforts to eliminate all kinds of earthly friction, one may even read this end of the world as a kind of collective wish fulfillment. One of the questions Morselli seems to have had on his mind is: How alive was everyone in the first place? ... Only someone well versed in loneliness—artistic, physical, emotional—could produce such a ruthlessly realistic account of an isolating catastrophe, tending to its false starts and its interruptions, its strange mixture of anxiety and tedium. In the end, that experience had a price.
Andrés Barba, Trans. by Lisa Dillman
MixedThe New York Times Book Review...the novel’s allegorical potential is stifled by a narrator who explains too much. He pores over the societal ramifications of the children’s disappearance so relentlessly he veers into platitudes...or an overlong pontification on the justice system, or a convoluted restating of the obvious ...The book follows in a long tradition of blending the genres of crime thriller and novel of ideas, but in this case what should be hybrid and fluid comes off as formally indecisive. Despite occasional flashes of charm...the narrator’s protracted yet unimaginative reflections slow down the plot, which then comes to rely less on nuance than on formula: Character sketches are swift, the denouement hasty ...The disappointing result may have something to do with the author’s choice of perspective. In his earlier novels...Barba has displayed an enviable gift for conveying, through an inventively abstract style, the strange worlds of childhood and early adolescence. The voice of this novel, precisely translated by Lisa Dillman, may have gained more traction if it had been channeled through one of its many children. As it stands, A Luminous Republic reads too often like a middling civil servant’s report: underlined by good intentions and promising themes, but ultimately unenlightening.
