Antonio Muñoz Molina - Your Steps On The Stairs (Other Press, 2025) ****

There is one of those visual illusion videos on internet that instruct you to watch closely and notice the changes. Even if you are highly alert to what might change, obviously nothing seems to change (because it is an illusion after all) until you compare the beginning with the end. Then you notice how much has changed, and you cannot understand that you did not notice it. The changes have been so slow as to be barely noticeable. This novel is like that. 

The story is simple. A retired husband and his dog are waiting for his wife, after they moved from New York to Lisbon. She's a brain scientist and is still at an international conference. He prepares the flat for her arrival, making sure every aspect of the place is welcoming and familiar. The background is climate change and its devastating results on society. His thoughts are constantly with her. His every move, his every decision is about her imminent arrival. Like climate change itself, you see barely anything happening at all in the novel, but that is - as said - an illusion. It's repetitive, very detailed, very loving, only things are not as they seem. Readers who appreciate W.G. Sebald will also like to read Muñoz Molina.

The novel is also about solitude, memory and perception. The slow pace of the story is highly enjoyable because of Muñoz Molina's precise style and the warmth of the narrator's feelings for his wife. Apart from the terrible happenings in society, he withdraws from the world and its symbolic center - New York - to a place somewhere on the edge - an old neighbourhood in Lisbon. His cocooning in the warmth of marital love is a kind of weapon against the horror of politics and nature. He is waiting in his flat, and switching channels on TV, giving him a high level picture of the outside world. 

"Nuclear-armed. satraps, would-be dictators and genociders, purveyors of corruption and hatred, apocalyptic heirs to Lex Luthor and Doctor No. I see images of devastating hurricanes and Pacific islands being swallowed by rising seas. I see a procession of thousands of refugees flooding the highways and over­flowing border checkpoints and wanting to reach the United States like a pilgrim nation crossing the desert. I see young deer in the American forests staggering and falling to the ground in agony because each one has its blood sucked from it by more than fifty thousand ticks, which multiply limitlessly now that the winters are not cold enough to wipe them out. I see seabeds depleted by creatures as hardy and fertile as ticks, green crabs, "the cockroaches of the sea," says an announcer who has just come out of the water and taken off his scuba mask. Green crabs are so tough that they can survive up to an hour without oxygen. They are voracious predators that thrive on the same things that harm other species: higher sea temperatures and the lack of oxygen. They open the rocky shells of oysters with their pincers. They work in groups and attack lobsters much larger than themselves. When they've devoured all their prey, they begin to de­vour each other. I change the channel, and a Turkish news program in English says that the Saudi government assassins in charge of executing the journalist Khashoggi began to cut him up with an electric saw while he was still alive." (p. 266)

The horror of our modern era. 

The narrator entertains you - while waiting - about the works in his flat and the handyman Alexis who seems to be everywhere, about other loners in history such as Admiral Byrd who survived alone on the Arctic for six months, or Captain Nemo, or Robinson Crusoe, or even Montaigne in his tower, reading books, about what he understands from her brain science. 

I can only encourage readers to keep reading and to stay attentive to what is actually happening. I have read some reviews of this novels, but I cannot divulge what clearly others have missed. I do not want to spoil the pleasure of reading. I can only recommend this novel highly, and encourage you to read it till the end.