Your Steps on the Stairs (2025) by Antonio Munoz Molina

 Audiobook Review

Your Steps on the Stairs (2025) 

by Antonio Munoz Molina 

  I really enjoyed To Walk Alone in the Crowd (2021), the English translation of Munoz' 2018 book- not quite a novel, not quite non-fiction, about the pleasures of walking a city i.e. ode to the flaneur.  Personally, I love strolling through a city, even if my chosen city, Los Angeles is not on anyone's list of top cities to perform this activity.  By contrast, Your Steps on the Stairs, is clearly a novel, even as it shares the same digressive DNA as Crowd.  It's about a late-middle aged Spainard, who, at the beginning of the book, has been "forcibly retired" from his corporate job in New York City, and is engaged in preparing a Lisbon apartment for the arrival of his partner, a female scientist.   From page one, any reader is likely to suspect what I suspected- something is amiss.

   As the plot slowly winds, Munoz treats the reader to all sorts of observations about Libson, New York City and contemporary relationships.  There are some surreal moments, such as when the narrator attends a terrible party given by a pop star who has recently purchased one of the mansions on the edge of Lisbon and realizes that most of the attendees are hired for the night- by his own handyman.  It makes for great Audiobook listening- ideal really, I highly recommend anything you can find by Munoz in translation.