In the Night of Time
*Starred Review* It is 1936. War-weary Spanish architect Ignacio Abel travels—from Valencia to France to New York and then, finally, by train into the wooded Hudson Valley—to a lifesaver of an academic job at a small upstate university. And, he hopes, to a reunion with Judith Biely, the American woman with whom he had a passionate extramarital affair in Madrid a year earlier and for whom he has been searching, constantly, since she didn’t appear at their usual rendezvous spot in crumbling, war-frantic Madrid. He has escaped the war, it would appear, but he is alone, near broke, and haunted by memories and regrets. His tailored European suits are frayed and out of place. As in A Manuscript of Ashes (2008), Molina is interested in the legacy of violence and the messy interplay between the past and the present. Although more traditional in its form than some of his earlier works, this selection covers a lot of ground rather slowly (paying considerable attention to, for example, the bourgeois trappings of Ignacio and his conservative wife, Adela) and tends to circle back repeatedly to key events and images. Readers who persist will be rewarded with a large rough-cut gem of a story that lingers in one’s mind. Molina recently won the Jerusalem Prize and the Asturias Prize, and he appears to be finally getting the international attention he deserves. --Brendan Driscoll