There is perhaps no better setting for a psychological thriller than melancholic Lisbon. And the academic of the language Antonio Munoz Molina I already knew it since I wrote that other story "Winter in Lisbon." And it is that in that city overlooking the immensity of the Atlantic, between mists, humidity and the undeniable romantic point of its urban appearance, which seems to suspend it in time, any story that takes us into that tension between the existential and the magical can be projected , with reflections in its monuments, in its history, in the echoes of the great earthquake that shook it and that even today seems to confront it with atavistic fears exorcised through its fados.
But focusing on history, Lisbon becomes for the protagonists a poetic destination in which to compose the verses of a shared life that, under the shadows of the New York skyscrapers, seems to have paled, even more so when the memory of 11/XNUMX follows them. lurking with that sense of urgency of every survivor of the catastrophe.
But Bruno and Cecilia may be preparing a reunion with very different perceptions about life and about their coexistence. The noise of New York, the naturalized fears after the great attack, the acquired routines, the brief communication. Perhaps they are not both the same as they thought they were and while one waits for an end of the world consumed drop by drop from that viewpoint to eternity that is Lisbon, the other may be oriented towards a vital change of another kind.
Love is also routine, but it is not just full love. The anticipated breakdown of the couple, the critical point at the peak of the inflection, comes as a metaphor for her dedication. Cecilia is a neurologist who studies the field of memories and fears, perhaps the foundations that build our walls and that make up our subjective notion of the world. And based on this very complicated task in the scientific and even in the human, a poetic, existential tension arises, a sliding action between the impressions of the two characters that seem to have been united more by a tragic sense of life, adopted since 11/XNUMX, than by any other more vital impulse.
A novel that addresses that idea of the searches for paradises and that end up transmitting the aftershocks of the vital earthquake that is coming.
You can now buy the novel Your steps on the ladder, the new book by Antonio Muñoz Molina, here: