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.

Train Whistle Guitar(1974) by Albert Murray

 1,001 Novels:  A Library of America

Train Whistle Guitar (1974)

by Albert Murray

Gasoline Point, Alabama

Alabama: 16/18

    I know I've been saying this since I reached the halfway point, but I will be glad to see the end of Alabama.   Train Whistle Guitar, by noted African American critic and novelist Albert Murray, was a real discovery.  I'm not a jazz guy, so I haven't read any of his criticism, but I was vaguely aware of his influence on multiple generations of subsequent critics and scholars, and the fact that he lived long enough to see himself canonized.  Among his works of criticism, Train Whistle Guitar was the first in a series of novels following the childhood and adulthood of a Murray-like character named Scooter, who Wikipedia describes as an "alter-ego."

  Train Whistle Guitar is the rare 1,001 Novels: A Library of America that shows any kind of interest in modernist technique, specifically, there is no third person narrator voice giving the reader explanatory paragraphs- you are just in the world with Murray.  Reading this book in Court and at jail, it was clear I should have taken more time with it, so that I could focus on the technique, but alas. 

Slavery's Capitalism (2016) edited by Sven Rickert

 Audiobook Review

Slavery's Capitalism (2016)

edited by Sven Rickert

   One of the interesting by-products of the state-by-state, geographical approach of the 1,001 Novels: A Library of America, is that it really awakens an interest in the underlying history itself.  Since I've been reading about the south now for almost a year, naturally I've become interested in the history of the region, and specifically the economics of slavery.  The economics of slavery were a central to concern to both pro and anti-slavery forces until the matter was settled during the Civil War, and then after that both sides continued to make use of their propaganda-type arguments, which further obscured rational discussion and investigation of these issues.

  Both sides played their part.  Obviously, proponents of the Southern side do not want to dwell on the real economics of slavery- the whole idea is to drape the past with a gauze that softens the edges.  However, the North also did it's part, in that generations of Northern scholars have ignored or hidden the dramatic links between slavery in the American south and Northern capitalism.   I can attest to that based on my own trips to the Northeast, where I've visited a variety of history museums and read a handful of economic history books looking for scholars who make what seem like obvious connections. 

  Mostly what this book does is say these obvious things in print.  The format is uneven- it reads like a graduate level seminar where each participant submitted one chapter- many of the individual essays read almost like school projects, so mostly the value here is seeing the broad themes outlined in economic terms.  Specifically, you've got the economic ties between the slave holding south and northern (and European capitalism), they dynamic inside the south, namely the shift that occurred when the FOREIGN slave trade was abolished in 1808.  This book reveals the black line marking one era from the next.  Most Americans- and I'm talking the educated ones here, not the idiots, think only of this first part- the slavery of transatlantic importation of slaves.  Crucially though it is the second part- where slaves moved out of the older societies of Maryland and Virginia southward, culminating in the Cotton Boom of the early 19th century in present day Alabama and Mississippi.

 This is the distinctly American slavery this is more important to most African Americans, novelists and scholars. Both of modes of slavery where insanely cruel, but it was the trade within the United States that has really been highlighted for me both by this book and by the books in the 1,001 Novels: A Library of America project.

The Last Hotel for Women (1996) by Vicki Covington

 1,001 Novels: A Library of America

The Last Hotel for Women (1996)

by Vicki Covington

Birmingham, Alabama

Alabama: 15/18

   I think Alabama is probably the worst literary state thus far.  They don't even have a good detective novel/police procedural down here. The Last Hotel for Women is interesting by the standards of its Alabama mapped compatriots, in that it features historical villain Bull Connor as not just a major character, but sometimes narrator of this story of the Freedom Riders.   It's struck me reading books from this part of the country that there is no one epic novel of this period that goes day by day, month by month, year by year and that learning the nuts and bolts of how this all went down requires non-fiction titles.  Covington, at least, brings some insight to the less sympathetic side, as embodied by Connor, who was a staunch segregationist. 

  Bull Connor distinguishes himself as a rare type of villain in the deep south- an urban villain, ruling over a mixed population in an industrialized city, of which I believe Birmingham is the only one- in the sense that we use that term in reference to locales like Detroit, Pittsburgh and Cleveland circa the mid 20th century.   He is sophisticated enough that the n word is used less frequently in this novel than in almost any other from this state, and the contention here is not whether some people should enslave other people. As Connor himself says multiple times in this book, he loves his black brothers and sisters and just wants them to thrive separately from whites.  

 I hadn't heard of Convington before this book.  Looking at her Amazon product listings, I would probably put her as "forgotten."