Paris. Spring 1940. It’s been persistently cold ever since the previous year lurched into this one, and the walls of 10 Rue Dombasle can’t keep it out. Walter Benjamin’s heart is failing. In January, it had become so inflamed that its rhythm turned rapid and irregular, the chill of the city air too penetrating for him to be able to walk more than a few paces before exhaustion set in. Huddled in the apartment in the 15ième arrondissement that he shares with his sister Dora, he writes to friends and former colleagues. He petitions them for assistance in acquiring a visa to the United States, which will arrive too late. In a matter of weeks, Paris will fall, and they will be forced to flee before the city becomes a trap whose jaws have closed. Nazi forces have already crossed the French border. Though the year begins so inauspiciously, Benjamin nonetheless completes one of the works for which he will be best remembered: Über den Begriff der Geschichte, his theses on the philosophy of history.

Midway through Dora Bruder, the narrator recalls how, as a younger man, he came across some antisemitic literature from the 1940s, which inadvertently inspired him to write his first novel. Looking back to the writing he subsequently produced, the narrator reflects on his ambitions: ‘je voulais dans mon premier livre répondre à tous ces gens dont les insultes m’avaient blesse à cause de mon père. Et, sur le terrain de la prose française, leur river une fois pour toutes leur clou. Je sens bien aujourd’hui la naïveté enfantine de mon projet: la plupart de ces auteurs avaient disparu, fusillés, exilés, gâteux ou morts de vieillesse. Oui, malheuresement je venais trop tard’ (DB, 71). While this statement might initially appear to be merely an innocuous expression of regret as the narrator focuses on his intense desire to react against fascist writers and considers himself to have been somewhat naïve in his hopes of confronting these supporters of the National Socialist regime, his remark also offers an intriguing point of departure for reading Dora Bruder. It demonstrates a clear awareness on the part of the narrator of the late historical position from which he is writing, as well as of the national literary tradition in which he sees himself. Looking back on events and figures from the past, he is aware of himself as a latecomer and of the ways in which his engagement with history is contingent on this lateness: he is both determined by and distanced from the past that is the focus of his narrative. Crucially, moreover, it is on the field of French literature where his engagement with authors and literary works of the past will take place.

Chance encounters between individuals and books recur throughout Antonio Muñoz Molina’s Sefarad, his eleventh novel but only the second of his works to be translated into English. The evocation in its early pages of how ‘en un viaje se escucha una historia o se encuentra por azar un libro que acaba abriendo una onda concéntrica en la emoción de los descubrimientos sucesivos’ (S, 227) could stand as a guiding motif for this sprawling, cacophonic novel. In one of its few recollections of a journey with positive associations, which accompanies this pronouncement, the final volume of Marcel Proust’s A la recherche du temps perdu (1913–1927) emerges not unfittingly as just such a book that will trigger associative discoveries: ‘en un tren que me alejaba de Granada, recién terminado el curso en la facultad, a principios del verano de 1976, yo iba leyendo el relato del viaje a Venecia que hace Proust en El tiempo recobrado’ (S, 224–225). In a conversation with a colleague by the name of Francisco Ayala, it transpires that ‘él también la asociaba con la felicitad simultánea de un viaje’ (S, 225), so much so that ‘llevaba siempre consigo un volumen de Proust, y le parecía que la relectura era aún más sabrosa porque al apartar los ojos del libro veía unos paisajes como del otro extremo del mundo, transitaba en un instante de las calles de Paris en 1900 y de las playas nubladas de Normandía a las inmensidades deshabitadas de América’ (S, 225). Despite the apparently engrossing experience of reading—and, indeed, of pausing to read—that it recalls, this brief episode of exile in the Americas is tinged with a nostalgic desire to return to somewhere other than an imagined Paris.