In Her Absence

Author: Antonio Muñoz Molina 

At a recent party, one of our guests declared that Antonio Munoz Molina will someday win the Nobel Prize for Literature.  He has won numerous Spanish awards and is considered one of Spain’s greatest living writers. I hadn’t read a single book of his, and decided to fix this deficiency immediately. 

I drove to the library and found a translation of "In her Absence”. It was a short 126 pages and had an intriguing story-line about a troubled relationship between a woman of high society and a bureaucrat. Blanca lived a privileged life with a passion for art like painting, writing or sculpting. While she was not an artist herself, she rubbed shoulders with artists and sculptors who were at the top of their game. She could immerse herself in a great book and be impervious to even the presence of her husband Mario, who was more of an everyday man working to put food on the table, in Madrid. While Mario did not have a single sophisticated bone in his body he was madly in love with his wife Blanca. So he pretends to have a taste for the avantgarde art that so intrigues her. 

Molina’s prose is breathtaking as he describes the incompatibility between the two and the ensuing mismatch. The ending, or should I say beginning, is bizarre and I will let you read it and make your own conclusion.