To Walk Alone in the Crowd: A Novel

About this book

Winner of the 2020 Medici Prize for Foreign Novel From the award-winning author of the Man Booker Prize finalist Like a Fading Shadow Antonio Muoz Molina presents a flneur-novel tracing the path of a nameless wanderer as he walks the length of Manhattan and his mind. De Quincey Baudelaire Poe Joyce Benjamin Melville Lorca Whitman . . . walkers and city dwellers all collagists and chroniclers picking the detritus of their eras off the filthy streets and assembling it into something new shocking and beautiful. In To Walk Alone in the Crowd Antonio Muoz Molina emulates these classic inspirations following their peregrinations and telling their stories in a book that is part memoir part novel part chronicle of urban wandering. A skilled collagist himself Muoz Molina here assembles overheard conversations subway ads commercials blazing away on public screens snatches from books hurriedly packed into bags or shoved under ones arm mundane anxieties and the occasional true flash of insightstruggling to announce itself amid this barrage of datainto a poem of contemporary life: an invitation to let oneself be carried along by the sheer energy of the digital metropolis. A denunciation of the harsh noise of capitalism of the conversion of everything into either merchandise or garbage (or both) To Walk Alone in the Crowd is also a celebration of the beauty and variety of our world of the ecological and aesthetic gaze that can even now recycle waste into art and provide an opportunity for rebirth.