Categoría: English
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BBC: Antonio Muñoz Molina: In the Night of Time
Antonio Muñoz Molina answers questions on his novel In the Night of Time, a panoramic portrait of Spain on the brink of civil war.
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Of Craft and Matter
The foreground of the most looked-at painting in the museum is partly taken up by a painting seen from the back. Everything in Las Meninas seems overt and at the same time is deceptive. The mystery of what may or may not be painted on the canvas is counterpoised by the concrete evidence of its reverse, and…
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Rounds of the Prado: The Place of Painting
Each morning, for the past few months, I have left my house and followed the same route to the Prado. In a bag slung over my shoulder, I keep a pen, a pencil, and two notebooks for the work ahead. Nothing else. The large notebook is to take notes in the museum library, in the…
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The other pandemic
At every turn, Spanish politics are becoming more toxic than the virus that’s caused a pandemic. Day after day, ever since the beginning of this bleak September, the stream of news about the rise in contagion and deaths has been aggravated by the deplorable spectacle of political discord, of inefficiency working hand in hand with partisanship,…
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Siegfried’s Bloodline
Music can have a decisive influence in a person’s life and in a nation’s history. Were it not for a brief passage in the second volume of Ian Kershaw’s biography of Hitler, I would never have learned of the direct connection between Wagner’s Siegfried and the first crucial victory of Franco’s army during the uprising that set…
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Mr. Nobody
I Who Have Been So Many Men. He opens his eyes in the dark, and hearing nothing but silence, he cannot tell where he is, or the time, the day, the year, the period of his life. Presently he has no name, no face and no biography. There is no clear boundary in his mind between…
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In Francoland
It happened to me on the last night of September in Heidelberg, but it has also happened quite frequently in other cities in Europe and the United States, and even here in Spain, when talking with foreign journalists. At various points throughout different eras, I have been forced to explain patiently, and with as much…
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Lives and Misfortunes of Lorenzo Da Ponte
How many lives was Lorenzo Da Ponte able to live in the eighty-nine years that took place between his birth in a Jewish ghetto outside Venice in 1749 and his death in New York? The mere outline of dates and places is already somewhat astonishing: for someone to reach such longevity at a time when…
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The Lineage of Thomas De Quincey
Whether you know it or not, if you write creatively for a newspaper and let yourself drift through the city in a tide of strangers; if you shudder at the mysteries of reality and the fiendish twists of the imagination; if you feel tempted to yield to the drunkenness of life’s sensations or of artificial…
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Don Quixote or the Art of Becoming
Becoming, not being, is what the Novel as an art form is all about, and that is why we regard Don Quixote as the first modern fictional hero. In epic poems, in tragedies, the task of the hero is to fulfill his destiny, to act out the deeds he was born to perform. The hero…