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A Manuscript Of Ashes (1986)

by Antonio Muñoz Molina(Favorite Author)

3.48 of 5 Votes: 3

ISBN

0151014108 (ISBN13: 9780151014101)

languge

English

genre

Historical Fiction

publisher

Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

review 1: Es una novela cuya trama avanza desdiciéndose y espejándose (como si el presente repitiera el pasado), con un estilo y un lenguaje muy poéticos y precisos. Puede ser de lectura un poco difícil porque el estilo del autor es usar oraciones larguísimas, con giros y modificadores dentro de la misma oración. Si lo que se busca es lectura ligera, busquen otra cosa. Es una historia de (varios) amores, una novela histórica, un thriller policial, y todo formando una unidad potente. En mi opinión, excelente.
review 2: This was an "interesting" read for me. I am a Brit who lived in Spain for a couple of years and during that time I discovered Antonio Munoz Molina. At that time my Spanish was up to reading him in the original but almost twenty years on my command o... moref the language is rather rusty and I was pleased to find a couple of his novels are available in translation. So I bought this book on the premise that I was being taken back to Magina - a city I already knew rather well in my mind. The first issue is the translation which is problematic to say the least. The translator is American and it appears that she has tried to translate Latin American Spanish into US English. Munoz is a member of the Spanish academy (fairly sure of that but I haven't looked it up) and really doesn't use Mexican colloquialisms. Some of the translations are just clunky, for example "Casa de Campo" literally translates as "country house" and that is what the translator uses here, but the usual translation into English is "cottage". There are many other examples. Partly as a result, the very long sentences - some of them half a page long - that seem natural in Spanish now appear lumpy and labyrinthine. Having said that, the magic of Munoz ( by the way, how do you type an enya on an iPad?) is not completely lost. His best work deals with the alienation of the generation that grew up in Spain under the Franco dictatorship and this novel makes a contribution to the overall body of work. It is not his best ( that would be El Jinete Polaco) but I am glad I read it. I just wish I had gritted my teeth and tackled the original - even if I would have needed a Spanish dictionary at hand throughout. less

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