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celiaa_ariass's review against another edition
challenging
emotional
reflective
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
4.25
soavezefiretto's review against another edition
4.0
I'm loving the familiar setting of Madrid, the feeling that I could walk around with the book open and follow Ignacio Abel and Judith Biely on their illicit escapades; I also recognize a lot of the characters in myself or the people I know, and not only the nice parts. It does get a bit long sometimes, but it's worth every minute.
shimizee's review against another edition
5.0
Brillantísima recreación del Madrid de 1936, con una intensa historia de amor como eje. Casi mil páginas pero deliciosa novela.
eri_123's review
2.0
I only finished this book by giving myself a square of chocolate after each chapter as it was so tedious.
The unlikeable, vague, even a little asshole-y Ignacio Abel does three things in 641 pages: leave his hotel, rush to get on a train, and then get off the train. The rest of the tumultuous events occur in flashback with inconsistent perspectives and insufficient punctuation. The run-on sentences are magnificent, but I'd love a few more full stops.
The last quarter of the book, where the pace increases dramatically, was a shocking portrayal of war and its ramifications for individuals, and a very detailed, emotive insight into the Spanish civil war, but the first section of the book was self-indulgent and dull. If you can slog through the former, the latter is rewarding, but it's such hard work to get there.
The unlikeable, vague, even a little asshole-y Ignacio Abel does three things in 641 pages: leave his hotel, rush to get on a train, and then get off the train. The rest of the tumultuous events occur in flashback with inconsistent perspectives and insufficient punctuation. The run-on sentences are magnificent, but I'd love a few more full stops.
The last quarter of the book, where the pace increases dramatically, was a shocking portrayal of war and its ramifications for individuals, and a very detailed, emotive insight into the Spanish civil war, but the first section of the book was self-indulgent and dull. If you can slog through the former, the latter is rewarding, but it's such hard work to get there.
recitalphobe's review
challenging
dark
informative
sad
tense
slow-paced
- Strong character development? It's complicated
- Loveable characters? No
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
2.0
There were some beautifully written sentences/paragraphs, but they were overshadowed by sentences so long I had to go back to their beginning to find the subject and verb, it was often difficult to infer the perspective, time and/or place relating to segments of the story, and there was way too much repetition. It would have been a better read at 250-350 pages.
arirang's review
3.0
"He knows now that personal identity is too fragile a tower to stand on its own without witnesses to certify it or glances to acknowledge it. The memories of what matters to him most are as distant as if they belonged to another man. The face in the passport is almost a stranger's; the one he is used to seeing now in the mirror, Judith Biely [his lover] or his children would not recognise. In Madrid he saw the faces of people he thought he knew well transformed overnight into the faces of executioners or prophets or fugitives or cattle brought to the slaughter; faces entirely occupied by mouth shouting in euphoria or panic; faces of the dead barely recognisable, half converted into red pulp by a rifle bullet; waken faces deciding on life and death behind a table lit by a lamp while rapid fingers type lists of names...As he reminisces about the day a little over a year ago when he first saw Judith there's almost no feeling of loss, because what's lost has ceased to exist as completely as the man who might have longed for it. There is instead a scrupulous striving for exactitude, the desire to leave a mark through the effort to imagine a world that's been erased, leaving behind few material traces, so fragile that they too are destined for a swift disappearance. But he isn't satisfied with his attempts to restore that moment to its authenticity, stripping away the additional and superimpositions of memory, like the restorer who cleans a fresco with delicate patience to bring back the splendour of the original colours. He wants to relive the steps that led him to that encounter that might not have happened, to reconstruct step by step that entire afternoon, the prelude, the hours that brought him to this point in his life."
In the Night of Time tells an all too-conventional love story but set against the memorably drawn background of Spain during the Civil War in 1936.
The central character, the architect Ignacio Abel, has fled the conflict in Madrid to the safe-haven of America - and also indirectly fled his family (who are on the other side of the conflict both physically and in sympathy) in pursuit of his American lover. The novel re-examines the events, both personal and historical, that have led to this point.
The portrayal of the civil war is all the more memorable for being mostly off-staged, viewed by it's impact on the characters' lives and also focused more on the conflicts, rivalries and terrors on the Republican side rather than the atrocities of the advancing Nationalists.
And the novel is at it's best when it describes how identity and certainties disintegrate so quickly in the face of geo-political forces. Abel encounters Dr Rossman, a renowned architect but who, since they met last, has been expelled from both communist Russia and Nazi Germany:
"But Dr rossman was not an older version of the man Ignacio had met in Weimar in 1923 or to whom he'd said goodbye one day in September 1929 in Barcelona...less than six years later in April or May of 1935, he was another man, not changed or aged but transfigured, his skin pale as if his blood had been diluted or extracted, his eyes like slightly cloudy water, his gestures frail and his voice as faint as a convalescent, his suits as worn as if he hadn't taken it off, even to go to sleep, since leaving Barcelona in 1929."
But as Rossman points out, as the civil war begins to take hold, is Abel so different:
“You Spaniards think that things are solid, that what has endured until now will last forever...You think there’s still time, don’t try to fool me, you hear what I say and think I’m exaggerating or beginning to lose my mind. You feel safe because you’re in your city and your country and at heart you think that I and others like me belong to another species, another race. But time’s running out my friend, it slips away from us more and more quickly."
And towards the novel's end, Abel finds himself at a dinner at a private college in the US and has similar thoughts about the President and US society generally:
"He think's he's immortal, Abel thought...he thinks he'll never grow old, that no misfortune will ever befall him, that his house will never be burned, that we won't be awakened at midnight and taken away in his pyjamas to an empty lot and killed in front of headlights"
Molina also touches on the wider situation in Europe as extremism takes a grip, including this memorable vignette on the rising numbers of stateless people:
"Intensely singular and at the same time resembling the others; those who'd left their countries long before and those who had no country to go back to, the stateless carrying Nansen passports from the League of Nations, not allowed to stay in France, but also not admitted to any other country: German Jews, Romanians, Hungarians, Italian anti-fascists, Russians languidly resigned to exileor furiously arguing about their increasingly phantasmagorical country, each with his own language and his own particular manner of speaking bad French, all united by an identical air of their foreignness, documents that didn't guarantee much and bureuacratic decisions always delayed"
Molina effectively links Abel's thoughts on architecture to his views on life - both societal and personal. The novel is strong on Abel's relationship with his wife's family: he married an older woman from a prestiguous family, in part (at least with hindsight) to advance his career, and looking back on his life he realises it "had flattened as it became more solid, stripped of risk and also of surpirse, like a project that acquires a firm, useful prescence when it materialises and at the same time loses the originality and beauty that were powerful possibilities at the start, when it was no more than a sketch, a play of lines in a notebook."
On his relationships with his adopted family by marriage (his own parents are both dead):
"They were magnanimous enough to accept him as one of their own; they'd presented him with the most distinguished (though somewhat frayed) daughter of their irreproachable family and facilitated his access to the first rungs of a profession to which he otherwise could not have aspired no matter how many academic honours and diplomas in architecture he might have. They expected him to fulfil his responsibilities, to pay in regular instalments and for the rest of his life the formidable interest on his debt: dignified behaviour, observable conjugal ardor, rapid fatherhood...for years he performed the role so literally and with no detectable effort that he almost forgot another life might have been possible."
And Molina uses an interesting narrative device of an an accusatory letter from Abel's wife interwoven in very brief snatches through the text. "In reality this written voice is the only one that has addressed him since he began his journey, the irate, accusing voice, no longer hurt, only filled with rage, a rage chilled by distance and the act of writing and perhaps, too, by the awareness that the addressee might never receive the letter."
Overall I had mixed feelings with the novel. Molina's isn't fond of the pithy one-liner when 5 pages would otherwise do (the Blaise Pascal quote leaps to mind https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/21224-i-have-only-made-this-letter-longer-because-i-have). The novel is deliberately slowed-down, reflective and re-examining events in forensic detail but, much as I hate to use the word in a review of a literary novel, the effect at times is tedious: tellingly I was relieved rather than left wanting more when the novel finished.
The narrative voice is also a slightly odd choice - it is narrated by an explicit third person observer, Molina himself, not by Abel, as if somehow watching the people and events from outside, indeed the book opens "I see him first at a distance in the rush-hour crowd". But Molina is inconsistent as to whether he is onmiescient or limited in his insights: often he allows himself to drop into the thoughts not only of Abel but of other characters (some real historical figures) and yet he also comments: "I want to imagine, with the precision of lived experience, what happened twenty years before I was born...to do this I'd need to be innocent of the future, ignorant of what is imminent in the present." (Molina himself was born in 1956)
And by far the weakest aspect of the novel is the focus on the affair between Abel and his American lover - there is nothing new or distinctive. His lover comments on page 350 that she had been "childishly imagining she was experiencing a novel-worthy love"; the reader's problem is that the previous 350 pages, and much of the next 250, require us to read that novel.
In the Night of Time tells an all too-conventional love story but set against the memorably drawn background of Spain during the Civil War in 1936.
The central character, the architect Ignacio Abel, has fled the conflict in Madrid to the safe-haven of America - and also indirectly fled his family (who are on the other side of the conflict both physically and in sympathy) in pursuit of his American lover. The novel re-examines the events, both personal and historical, that have led to this point.
The portrayal of the civil war is all the more memorable for being mostly off-staged, viewed by it's impact on the characters' lives and also focused more on the conflicts, rivalries and terrors on the Republican side rather than the atrocities of the advancing Nationalists.
And the novel is at it's best when it describes how identity and certainties disintegrate so quickly in the face of geo-political forces. Abel encounters Dr Rossman, a renowned architect but who, since they met last, has been expelled from both communist Russia and Nazi Germany:
"But Dr rossman was not an older version of the man Ignacio had met in Weimar in 1923 or to whom he'd said goodbye one day in September 1929 in Barcelona...less than six years later in April or May of 1935, he was another man, not changed or aged but transfigured, his skin pale as if his blood had been diluted or extracted, his eyes like slightly cloudy water, his gestures frail and his voice as faint as a convalescent, his suits as worn as if he hadn't taken it off, even to go to sleep, since leaving Barcelona in 1929."
But as Rossman points out, as the civil war begins to take hold, is Abel so different:
“You Spaniards think that things are solid, that what has endured until now will last forever...You think there’s still time, don’t try to fool me, you hear what I say and think I’m exaggerating or beginning to lose my mind. You feel safe because you’re in your city and your country and at heart you think that I and others like me belong to another species, another race. But time’s running out my friend, it slips away from us more and more quickly."
And towards the novel's end, Abel finds himself at a dinner at a private college in the US and has similar thoughts about the President and US society generally:
"He think's he's immortal, Abel thought...he thinks he'll never grow old, that no misfortune will ever befall him, that his house will never be burned, that we won't be awakened at midnight and taken away in his pyjamas to an empty lot and killed in front of headlights"
Molina also touches on the wider situation in Europe as extremism takes a grip, including this memorable vignette on the rising numbers of stateless people:
"Intensely singular and at the same time resembling the others; those who'd left their countries long before and those who had no country to go back to, the stateless carrying Nansen passports from the League of Nations, not allowed to stay in France, but also not admitted to any other country: German Jews, Romanians, Hungarians, Italian anti-fascists, Russians languidly resigned to exileor furiously arguing about their increasingly phantasmagorical country, each with his own language and his own particular manner of speaking bad French, all united by an identical air of their foreignness, documents that didn't guarantee much and bureuacratic decisions always delayed"
Molina effectively links Abel's thoughts on architecture to his views on life - both societal and personal. The novel is strong on Abel's relationship with his wife's family: he married an older woman from a prestiguous family, in part (at least with hindsight) to advance his career, and looking back on his life he realises it "had flattened as it became more solid, stripped of risk and also of surpirse, like a project that acquires a firm, useful prescence when it materialises and at the same time loses the originality and beauty that were powerful possibilities at the start, when it was no more than a sketch, a play of lines in a notebook."
On his relationships with his adopted family by marriage (his own parents are both dead):
"They were magnanimous enough to accept him as one of their own; they'd presented him with the most distinguished (though somewhat frayed) daughter of their irreproachable family and facilitated his access to the first rungs of a profession to which he otherwise could not have aspired no matter how many academic honours and diplomas in architecture he might have. They expected him to fulfil his responsibilities, to pay in regular instalments and for the rest of his life the formidable interest on his debt: dignified behaviour, observable conjugal ardor, rapid fatherhood...for years he performed the role so literally and with no detectable effort that he almost forgot another life might have been possible."
And Molina uses an interesting narrative device of an an accusatory letter from Abel's wife interwoven in very brief snatches through the text. "In reality this written voice is the only one that has addressed him since he began his journey, the irate, accusing voice, no longer hurt, only filled with rage, a rage chilled by distance and the act of writing and perhaps, too, by the awareness that the addressee might never receive the letter."
Overall I had mixed feelings with the novel. Molina's isn't fond of the pithy one-liner when 5 pages would otherwise do (the Blaise Pascal quote leaps to mind https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/21224-i-have-only-made-this-letter-longer-because-i-have). The novel is deliberately slowed-down, reflective and re-examining events in forensic detail but, much as I hate to use the word in a review of a literary novel, the effect at times is tedious: tellingly I was relieved rather than left wanting more when the novel finished.
The narrative voice is also a slightly odd choice - it is narrated by an explicit third person observer, Molina himself, not by Abel, as if somehow watching the people and events from outside, indeed the book opens "I see him first at a distance in the rush-hour crowd". But Molina is inconsistent as to whether he is onmiescient or limited in his insights: often he allows himself to drop into the thoughts not only of Abel but of other characters (some real historical figures) and yet he also comments: "I want to imagine, with the precision of lived experience, what happened twenty years before I was born...to do this I'd need to be innocent of the future, ignorant of what is imminent in the present." (Molina himself was born in 1956)
And by far the weakest aspect of the novel is the focus on the affair between Abel and his American lover - there is nothing new or distinctive. His lover comments on page 350 that she had been "childishly imagining she was experiencing a novel-worthy love"; the reader's problem is that the previous 350 pages, and much of the next 250, require us to read that novel.
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