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I just noticed the style difference between the two narratives. The first narrative about the building up of events to a climax on that one street is told in regular paragraph indentations while the second narrative of the girl years later is told in inverted paragraph indentations.
Absolutely brilliant!!

Loving this so far!👌

Although the plot is simple and straightforward I find the prose to be magnificent!

Antonio Munoz Molina does a brilliant job of conjuring up a vision of a seedy and dirty Lisbon circa 1968. I can feel the searing heat and smell the dirty river water. I can hear the sounds of the trains and the people speaking Portuguese. The isolation and fear that James Earl Ray felt is palpable. Well done!

Goodreads, please give me accurate % read.

I am engrossed in the James Earl Ray chapters but skimming the author’s autobiographical ones. If this book just focused on Ray it would be pretty damn good.☠️

Absolutely marvelous!!

“A man can spend several hours sitting cross-legged in the same position if he knows that nothing prevents him from changing it; but if he knows that he has to sit with his legs crossed like that, he will get cramps, his legs will twitch and strain towards where he would like to stretch them.”

EDIT “...like a darkness between blinks.”

“And silence drops down from out of the night, into this city, the briefest of silences, like a falter between heartbeats, like a darkness blinks. Secretly there is always this moment, an unexpected pause, a hesitation as one day is left behind and a new one begins. These moments are there, always, but they are rarely noticed and they rarely last longer than a flicker of thought. <>

Ohhh, horrible things are starting to happen 😬😒😳

OMG Cyril! You also suffered humiliation of a rejected advance and you had to continue to interact with that person on a daily basis. I feel your pain...

The thought that no one here knew who I was gave me a feeling of lightness... I was discovering a capacity I had rarely exercised in my life:the ability to radically change my circumstances and immerse myself in the unexpected; to forget entirely what I left behind; to lose myself...

This book is not about the assassination itself but rather the invention of identity not only by James Earl Ray but the author himself. How one can alter their life facts in seconds. How nothing is fixed. The incessant paranoia of being discovered. How every minute detail can betray you.

In a similar style to HHhH this is a blend of fact and fiction of the escape of James Earl Ray after he assassinated MLK Jr with an investigator becoming obsessed with an event decades in the past. The narrative jumps around quite frequently but once you get the hang of it it becomes easier to follow. What I’ve read thus far is quite impressive.

The Man Booker International longlist was just announced and it is taking all my willpower to finish this before starting on it. So many of the books sound excellent - I’m so excited!!😀

A fast paced story with ordinary prose. Although I’m enjoying it there is little literary merit here. No bells are ringing in my heart and no annotations are being made in the margins.

The adopted mother is hilarious!

Just started and already love! ❤️

“...no great movement designed to change the world can bear sarcasm or mockery, because they are a rust that corrodes all it touches.”

Don’t think this is the right book for me at the moment but I’m going to finish it since it’s a quick read. Not sure how much I’m enjoying the religious and philosophical meanderings.

Ok we have turned a corner on the plot line. Is there going to be an act of revenge?

“She put on her coat and left. Then I lay down in the bed with a void in my heart and I wanted to call her back, because I already missed her the moment I told her to go, because I knew that it was a thousand times better to be with a dressed and recalcitrant Lucie than to be without Lucie; because to be without Lucie meant living in absolute solitude.”

This is different than what I initially expected. Much more deeper and philosophical. Wondering where this will go?

“...if I survived her there would be yet another addition to those ubiquitous, undefinable shadow-presences that wrack me and drive me to despair.”

“I stood gazing at the trees lined up in rows like soldiers, contemplating the memories the land must hold, with so much blood, so many dead, and all their dreams, all that failure and defeat. How could it bear to go on producing with a burden like that?”

“how irrational, how unpredictable is the attraction between people, how fatal it’s current.”

“She was lonely. Who isn’t lonely? I’d like to know? And that includes people who do have someone but just haven’t noticed.”

Spectacular prose and haunting narrative. Really curious where this story is going.