Survivor guilt, eloquently expressed

“Sometimes when you hear a name, the name of a woman or a city, a story resonates in its syllables like a key to an encoded message, as if an entire life could be contained in one word,” writes award-winning Spanish novelist Antonio Munoz Molina in “Sepharad,” the third (after “Winter in Lisbon” and “Prince of Shadows”) of his 13 novels to be translated into English. “Every person carries his novel with him ... an episode in which that life is crystallized forever, summarized in a name, even if the name is unknown or may not be said aloud.”

“Sepharad” is a kaleidoscopic reverie on exile, evil and memory, played out against the shadows of Hitler, Stalin, World War II and the Sephardic diaspora, in which Munoz Molina writes the novels of the people he’s met and imagined, gleaning from the names he encounters stories that vibrate beneath the burden of history, that lift with the breath of human life. “There’s no limit to the surprising stories you can hear if you listen to the novels in people’s lives,” he tells us, and his commanding prose makes certain we listen.

Through an assemblage of memoir, history and fiction, Munoz Molina creates short-story-like tales that cohere eventually into a novel. There are imagined characters -- a cobbler in a tiny Spanish town whose likeness is copied for the community’s Holy Week sculpture of St. Matthew, a communist Hungarian shopkeeper who escapes to Tangier with his son, common folk experiencing the tragedies of the last century, people who disappear or are dispossessed -- as well as historical figures: Franz Kafka, Marcel Proust, Primo Levi and Willi Munzenberg, a communist spy whose tragic life has captured the author’s attention. The author’s own thoughts and remembrances, past and present, weave through the nonlinear narrative as well.

“I have flirted with the idea of writing a novel, imagined situations and places, like snapshots, or like those posters displayed on large billboards at the entrance to a movie theater,” he writes. “That these stills were never in narrative sequence made them all the more powerful, freed them of the weight and vulgar conventions of a scenario; they were revelations in the present, with no before or after.” In the same way, his tales, loosened from the bonds of chronology, accrue, gaining mass until they carry their own moral burden, steeping the reader in the experience of deep sadness and abiding loss, making his subject matter -- holocausts, purges, exile and hate -- into our own personal heartbreak.

Gorgeously written, the novel requires work to penetrate its ever-shifting surface. Though the author maintains a hazy focus on the experience of Spanish Sephardic Jews in Europe during World War II, the stories jump around in time, and the narrators shift, sometimes paragraph by paragraph. (A story narrated in the third person, for instance, will suddenly morph into a first-person monologue before leaping back into its original narrative stance, offering few tip-offs to the reader about what’s happening within the tale’s structure.) The individual set pieces appear as if in the fog of memory, changing locations, direction and speakers. This technique mimics both the capriciousness and the absolute certainty of remembered pasts -- what can be more unreliable than what we remember, and yet what can seem more concrete to us than whatever is lodged in our memories? -- but it can also make the book challenging to read.

Like a spiral moving away from the story’s starting point, “Sepharad” takes off on tangents that are densely layered but seem unconnected to the whole, only to spiral back to where the tale started but at a deeper, more intense level. The threat of exile, like the certainty of death, echoes throughout. “What do you do if you know that from one day to the next you can be driven from your home, that all it takes is a signature and a lacquer seal at the bottom of a decree for the work of your entire life to be demolished, for you to lose everything, house and goods, for you to find yourself out on the street exposed to shame, forced to part with everything you considered yours and to board a ship that will take you to a country where you will also be pointed at and rejected, or not even that far, to a disaster at sea, the frightening sea you have never seen?”

Haunting and difficult, “Sepharad” will reward tenacious readers who appreciate language. Ultimately it is a tribute, a payback in survivor guilt by one who cannot afford to forget: “The dead return during the sleepless hours,” Munoz Molina tells us, “people I have forgotten and people I never knew, all prodding the memory of one who survived a war sixty years ago, telling him not to forget them, to speak their names aloud and tell how they lived, why they were carried off so early by a death that could have claimed him. Whose place in life have I taken? Whose destiny was canceled so that mine could be fulfilled?”