* * *
VOYAGE AU BOUT DE SOI-MÊME. Baudelaire’s invitation to a voyage was happening to me in my own city, free of charge and just a few blocks from the office where I worked. I looked and listened to the city until my mind began to dissolve in it as in an opium dream, and I could see myself as well from the outside. I saw the silhouette of a man walking alone in the crowd. A prince in disguise, says Baudelaire, a homeless man, a spy, an opium addict, a photographer, a foreign agent following strangers, a kindly man moving through Dublin with a potato in the pocket of his coat, a man in love, turning every corner with a shudder of anticipation, a man come back from far away, from other lives and regions of time, a castaway shipwrecked in the city’s desert island, blinkered with thick glasses like Pessoa or like Benjamin, always carrying a satchel, large, and worn, and dark, from which he will never part.
ALSO BY ANTONIO MUÑOZ MOLINA
In the Night of Time
A Manuscript of Ashes
In Her Absence
Sepharad
Prince of Shadows
Winter in Lisbon
Like a Fading Shadow
A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Antonio Muñoz Molina is the author of more than a dozen novels, including In the Night of Time, Sepharad, and Like a Fading Shadow. He is the recipient of numerous prizes and awards, including Spain’s National Narrative Prize, the Planeta Prize, the Medici Prize for Foreign Novel, and the Princess of Asturias Award. He has been a full member of the Royal Spanish Academy since 1995. He lives in Madrid and New York City. You can sign up here.
A NOTE ABOUT THE TRANSLATOR
Guillermo Bleichmar holds a BA in English literature from Columbia University and a PhD in comparative literature from Harvard University. He teaches liberal arts at St. John’s College in Santa Fe, New Mexico.
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CONTENTS
Title Page
Copyright Notice
Epigraph
I. Office of Lost Moments
II. Mr. Nobody
Also by Antonio Muñoz Molina
A Note About the Author and Translator
Copyright
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
120 Broadway, New York 10271
Copyright © 2018 by Antonio Muñoz Molina
Translation copyright © 2021 by Guillermo Bleichmar
Frontispiece collage copyright © Antonio Muñoz Molina
All rights reserved
Originally published in Spanish in 2018 by Editorial Planeta, Spain, as Un andar solitario entre la gente
English translation published in the United States by Farrar, Straus and Giroux
First American edition, 2021
E-book ISBN: 978-0-374-72028-5
Our ebooks may be purchased in bulk for promotional, educational, or business use. Please contact the Macmillan Corporate and Premium Sales Department at 1-800-221-7945, extension 5442, or by email at [email protected].
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To Walk Alone in the Crowd Page 40
