El Viento de la Luna [Spanish]

Munoz Molina's novel is a moving evocation of the painful transition from the bliss of childhood to the loneliness of adolescence. The narrator is a thirteen year old boy who feels so oppressed within his reality (poverty, Franco's Spain, the collective memory of the Spanish civil war, Catholicism) that he becomes obsessed with the ongoing Apollo XI mission. The narrator lovingly reconstructs the moon flight from tidbits of information he gleans from magazines, library books, television reports, newspaper articles and the word on the street. This includes the propaganda inserted in the media by the-powers-that-be, which is evident to today's reader (as the propaganda inserted in our media will be comically evident to a reader forty years from now). The narrator's other obsession is -not surprisingly- his own sexuality which he explores with equal degrees of (very graphic) fervor and guilt. A novel for mature readers who will re-live the magic of going to the moon, historically and metaphorically.