To Walk Alone in the Crowd
A Novel
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5.0 • 1 Rating
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- $12.99
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
Winner of the 2020 Medici Prize for Foreign Novel
From the award-winning author of the Man Booker Prize finalist Like a Fading Shadow, Antonio Muñoz Molina presents a flâneur-novel tracing the path of a nameless wanderer as he walks the length of Manhattan, and his mind.
De Quincey, Baudelaire, Poe, Joyce, Benjamin, Melville, Lorca, Whitman . . . walkers and city dwellers all, collagists and chroniclers, picking the detritus of their eras off the filthy streets and assembling it into something new, shocking, and beautiful. In To Walk Alone in the Crowd, Antonio Muñoz Molina emulates these classic inspirations, following their peregrinations and telling their stories in a book that is part memoir, part novel, part chronicle of urban wandering.
A skilled collagist himself, Muñoz Molina here assembles overheard conversations, subway ads, commercials blazing away on public screens, snatches from books hurriedly packed into bags or shoved under one’s arm, mundane anxieties, and the occasional true flash of insight—struggling to announce itself amid this barrage of data—into a poem of contemporary life: an invitation to let oneself be carried along by the sheer energy of the digital metropolis.
A denunciation of the harsh noise of capitalism, of the conversion of everything into either merchandise or garbage (or both), To Walk Alone in the Crowd is also a celebration of the beauty and variety of our world, of the ecological and aesthetic gaze that can, even now, recycle waste into art, and provide an opportunity for rebirth.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Spanish writer Muñoz Molina, whose Like a Fading Shadow was shortlisted for the International Booker Prize, returns with an ambitious story of a writer-flaneur. An unnamed narrator enumerates his perceptions while walking in various cities: "I listen with my ears and with my eyes," he notes in the opening, set in Madrid. In New York City, he travels from the southern tip of Manhattan to the Bronx, to visit Edgar Allan Poe's former cottage. Interspersed are wistful descriptions of his aging wife ("She is enriched by the treasure of time") and gauzy meetings in a Madrid café with a mysterious man whose "physical features were forgotten as soon as he was gone." The narrator also ruminates extensively on such writers as Poe, Charles Baudelaire, Thomas De Quincy, Herman Melville, and Walter Benjamin, noting how they fell in social status while practicing "a useless trade pursued by people of no practical sense." Most of the narrative is in short prose fragments, often headed by phrases that mimic ad copy ("Go Wherever You Choose"). Occasionally the narrator breaks out into verse, cataloging terrorist attacks and deadly accidents. Some sections burst with political barbs ("Donald Trump with his gold Lex Luthor hairpiece, misgoverning"). In the end, the solitary writer's journeys and observations culminate in his discovery of solace in loving his wife, and his passion makes the narrative deeply rewarding. The result is a treasure trove.
