Ventanas De Manhattan/windows On Manhattan

Rating:
Summary: Windows on Manhattan
Review: Antonio Muñoz Molina's portrait of Manhattan at five o'clock in the afternoon, when the drunks dining on death meriendan muerte, or in the early hours when he hears the wail of ambulances, fire trucks and the incessant humming of the city, is a sublime tribute to Federico Garcia Lorca. He is also inspired, no doubt, by all the prodigious intellectuals who painted portraits of Manhattan before him --Hart Crane, Alexis de Tocqueville, Jean Baudrillard, E.B. White, Andrei Cordescu, inter alia. Yet, even when considering the great talent of the portraitists who preceded him, Antonio Muñoz Molina's brushstrokes are perhaps the finest; as fine as those of his beloved Vermeer at the Frick.

Part travelogue, part philosophical meditations on the self and the other, part memoir, part dissertation on love, longing, and nostalgia, Windows on Manhattan is nothing short of extraordinary.

Verónica Albin