In The Night of Time by Antonio Munoz Molina; trans. Edith Grossman, book review

Molina's central character is stranded in time, in place, in politics and in love

"What are you like when you are away from Spain?" his lover asks Ignacio Abel, the central character of Antonio Molina's immense, luminous panorama of the Spanish Civil War. He is an architect who strives to achieve simplicity in his buildings.

As a student of the Bauhaus and a pupil of Walter Gropius he advocates that school's philosophy of integrity of materials and the harmony of form and function. No little irony, then, that it is while giving a lecture on this subject that he meets the woman who will become his mistress, and who first appears as a shadow on his slide projections of classical architectural forms. Her question lies at the heart of a novel whose main theme is the relationship between personal, political and national identities.

It is against the greater backdrop of the collapse of the Spanish Republic that their affair is played out. And given that Ignacio is a man naturally anxious (we first meet him fretting over the timetable in Pennsylvania Station), and that among the qualities that define him are his "maniacal attention to detail, his incessant desire to understand everything, his fear of missing something of consequence, his anguish over the passage of time…" we begin to understand why some novels require a bigger canvas than others.

Indeed, one of the many wonders of this novel is how Molina integrates the personal so closely with the political, and how evenly he distributes his attention between the two. This is as much a novel about a doomed affair as it is about a civil war. At certain times the narrative seems consumed with a need to understand sexual relationships, both from the male and female viewpoints, at other times it seeks desperately to find meaning behind the allegiances of sectarian struggle. It is obsessively concerned with the quotidian, with describing everyday processes and things, with cityscapes and landscapes, and is in the fine tradition of novels of everything, reaching back to Cervantes by way of Bellow and Hemingway.

Ignacio is stranded in time, in place, in politics and in love. His world view is founded on architectural principles, "he knows the value of exact measurements… the balance between contrary forces that keeps a building standing". And of course it is the same play of contrary forces that keep a marriage, or a sovereign state, alive.

The parallels may not be subtle but they are deeply satisfying all the same. Ignacio believes in harmony and order, yet he is adrift in a turmoil of political unrest and marital conflict. It is because Molina burrows so deeply into his characters that these grand architectural themes feel unobtrusive. He brings an encyclopaedic knowledge of the times to bear in a way that never drags on the narrative. He moves through a large cast of characters, illuminating each one in turn, and seamlessly shifts perspective mid-chapter from husband to lover, from wife to children. Yet the novel is always channelled through Ignacio's experience.

When he flees Spain it seems as much to preserve a sense of an identity that is under attack from every quarter, as it is to pursue his mistress across the Atlantic. In a novel so concerned with the flow of memory and time, it seems fitting that the final chapters are set on the banks of the Hudson River, where Ignacio has been commissioned to design a library. This novel feels as vast as a library, and as compellingly seductive as a river.