A Manuscript of Ashes.

Molina, Antonio Munoz (author).

Much acclaimed in Spain, Muñoz Molina spent years of anonymity in U.S. literary circles, which ended abruptly with Sepharad (2003), in which private and public narratives of the Holocaust collided noisily, earning comparisons to W. G. Sebald and other explorers of historical memory. The protagonist of his debut novel, originally published in 1986, is Minaya, a university student tortured for his role in a student uprising, who retreats to his uncle’s country estate. He is supposed to be researching Jacinto Solana, a friend of his uncle and a political poet active during the Spanish civil war. Supposedly, the long-dead Solana hid a lost masterpiece somewhere in the house; also hidden is the truth about the alluring Mariana, loved by Solana and uncle alike, and shot dead on her wedding night. It’s a mystery novel of sorts—where’s the book? Who killed Mariana?—as well as an ambitious, expressive metafictional dramatization of the notion that readers are like private detectives to be deliberately befuddled by the author. If its self-reflexivity, nonlinear structure, and shape-shifting narrator obfuscate, it is because Muñoz Molina wants to probe the messy melding of history and memory.