SEPHARAD PDF, EPUB, EBOOK Antonio Munoz Molina,Prof Margaret Sayers Peden | 385 pages | 04 Aug 2008 | HARVEST BOOKS | 9780156034746 | English | United States Sepharad Definition and Meaning - Bible Dictionary Its descriptions of the narrator's state of mind, and of Madrid itself where I have done my fair share of wandering are so authentic and moving that I had the feeling of: "I could have written this. Why didn't I? I lived in Madrid around the time this was written late 90s to early 's , and his description of the seamy characters who populated this area is spot on. It was a scary and fascinating place back then, and though it has changed mostly for the better, the fact that it will never be the same again adds an aura of nostalgia and melancholy to this clearly drafted chapter. And of course, the final chapter "Sepharad", largely set in New York, which mentions the Spanish-Jewish cemetery on W11th St, and features a visit to the Hispanic Society on Wth Street, an impressive and nearly deserted treasure-house of Spanish art in an unlikely neighborhood. New York is my lifelong home, and Madrid is my second home and Molina describes them both so clearly and authentically that I immediately trust all of his other descriptions. Some of the other chapters that touch on Kafka, Primo Levi, and various European Jews of the 20th Century I found interesting, but less engaging. Obviously these chapters are based more on the author's reading than on his personal experience. But Molina is making an admirable attempt to weave the history of Spain which can sometimes feel like an island unto itself into the broader history of Europe, and to integrate the important and tragic role Jews have played in both of those histories. Again, I wouldn't call it a novel, and it doesn't even read as fiction for the most part. But I loved it, and think it's a great and unique work. I tried. If I had a shelf for, is-it-just-me-or-does-the-emperor-have-no-clothes, this would be on it. It got great reviews from all the snobby publications, and I simply couldn't make heads or tails of it. I didn't get any sense of a novel, and I never quite learned who the narrator narrators? It felt like each chapter was meant to be its own short story, but within each of those, several different tales were being told in an almost stream-of-consciousness way. One minute we're Catholic I tried. Maybe I should have given this more of a chance, but I had trouble giving it even the 50 pages I feel I owe any given book before deciding to discard it. An absolutely remarkable book; this is not so much of a novel as a collection of narratives from diverse times and backgrounds. The theme, such as it is, is about death, injustice, prejudice, sorrow and happiness. This book requires readers to be alert and fully engaged. It took me a while to get used to the style, particularly that sometimes in the middle of a paragraph the person speaking changes. For example, wife begins the conversation and then the husband's perspective takes over. The dial An absolutely remarkable book; this is not so much of a novel as a collection of narratives from diverse times and backgrounds. The dialogue is almost prose. Here's an example: "Bits and pieces of you are left behind in other lives, rooms you lived in that others now occupy, photographs or keepsakes or books that belonged to you and now someone you don't know is touching and looking at, letters still in existence when the person who wrote them and the person who received them and kept them for a long, long time are dead. Far from you, scenes from your life are relived, and in them you're a fiction, a secondary character in a book, a passerby in the film or novel of another persons life. From a literary point of view, was shooting oneself or killing oneself slowly with alcohol a form of heroism? I watched the hopeless drunks in the dark taverns of the side streets with both admiration and disgust, for each hid a terrible truth whose price was self- destruction. This is certainly an arresting and intriguing book, though its billing as 'a novel' is misleading. Rather, it is a loosely-themed collection of sketches, essays and stories. The author writes very beautifully, though I must confess that his habit of obscuring the identity and gender of the narrator was a little disconcerting. Perhaps that is intentional, as one theme running through the 17 chapters is that of uncertainty and dispossesion. This is essentially a book about the lives of the disappe This is certainly an arresting and intriguing book, though its billing as 'a novel' is misleading. This is essentially a book about the lives of the disappeared. Some of the tales refer to well known historic figures such as Kafka or Primo Levi, while others concern less well known people such as Jean Amery or Grete Buber-Neumann, wife of the s German Communist leader Hans Neumann. Other pieces centre on the author's own life from his past or his present. The sensation is one of transience and impermanence. The lives of those others are in transit, from or to incarceration or persecution, typically alone in the world and often filled with tragic outcomes for either themselves or their loved ones. The fear of a totalitarian society is conveyed, as you may enter a cafe to sit and drink coffee and read the newspaper - only to leave on the run newly aware of the latest decree marking you as a pariah Molina's writing is tender and very moving. The chapters of Sheherazade, America, You are.. Suddenly, for me the book made complete sense. Only 4 stars as I found the first third of it slightly befogging Finished it, but very slowly. Sepharad is a great and complex novel that should be read in sittings of no more than an hour. The narrative rolls seamlessly from person to person, place to place, time to time, so that the shifts are barely perceptible, and each time I became aware of another shift, I had to go back through the pages to discover how that had happened and wonder when I had left behind an imaginary character and encountered a historical one. It is a tapestry of interwoven vignettes Finished it, but very slowly. It is a tapestry of interwoven vignettes about flight, capture, death and escape, over time, that reflect a collective memory of human anguish and suffering and longing for home. Intensely lyrical, brilliant writing. Oddly, I think this is a better book than my experience of it might indicate. It's beautifully written covering most of the 20th century with a mix of history, memoir, story of experiencing the holocaust and of ageing, mainly, from multiple perspectives. But I just kept getting lost and confused sometimes I couldn't tell who was speaking or what time period I was in or he'd mention someone from a previous chapter and I vaguely remembered them. So glad i picked this back up to read. It's enthralling in the best possible way. Special recommendation thanks for youknowwhoyouare :. What exactly is this book? One might call it a memoir, but that would be selling it far too short and I don't know enough of his life to be able to say how much is biographical and how much invention. It is in some ways a book of historical essays of literary figures, but is far from that. You could also think of it as a history of the Jewish diaspora of a certain era, mostly before and during the Second World War. But none of this would do it justice. The title refers to the Iberian Peninsula, from which the Sephardic Jews derive both their name and cultural heritage. They do not deny their heritage, but are not in their own minds people of another nation or no nation. Nonetheless, throughout history, Jews have been categorized and vilified as a separate race, the protests of those being labeled having no bearing on the bigotry. Or, as another puts it more succinctly, "It was anti-Semitism that made me a Jew. Everything changes us, creates us anew, yet we cling to the shifting sand of our identities as if they were permanent structures. This frustrates and saddens us; our expectation of what is possible, that the ethereal will become tangible, that what slips through our hands will some day stay. In the end, though, this is a book about language, the beautiful flow of description and narration that delights and informs, filling us with joy and sorrow, the intentional, meticulous writing of a great author at the height of his powers, sharing with us the most intimate explorations of our souls, our failures, our pleasures sex inevitably plays a large role , our pain, and our demise and dissolution into dust, into memory, and eventually into not even that, the inevitable human vanishing act that is the fate of us all. We can rail against any of this, all of it, the brief and precious light we shed, but we cannot escape it, or ourselves. A note on translation: I do not read Spanish, so cannot speak to the poetry of this book in the original, but am filled with gratitude for the lyricism captured by Margaret Sayers Peden here.