Antonio Muñoz Molina at the Hudson Review:
July 6 We settle smoothly into our life in Lisbon, as if gliding along. Elvira finally started working in the study. I set up my things on the dining room table. There is a perfect silence. But when you open a window, you can hear in the distance the faint roar of airplanes flying into the city, crossing the Tagus over the 25 de Abril Bridge. I feel the great craving for books that comes over me each summer. I switch between Washington Square and Postwar by Tony Judt. The best of fiction and the best of history, which is just as impressively written. Henry James is unparalleled. Reading him makes you feel very envious.
It’s a similar envy to the one Elvira experiences when she starts reading Os Maias. Yesterday, we were saying sadly that the art of writing novels of that sort has vanished: highly crafted works of literature that are simultaneously fully immersed in the telling of a gripping story and the portraiture of real characters. These days, a novelist has to make it clear that he doesn’t very much care about the story he happens to be telling: he, and his skill or his technique, are what matter most. Alternately, some crude ideological melodrama written with staggering crassness is taken as a depiction of reality.
more here.
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