Review: Your Steps on the Stairs by Antonio Muñoz Molina

By Jack Moody

 

Antonio Muñoz Molina’s newly translated work is a difficult novel to pin down. On the surface it boasts a deceptively simple plot: A man waits for his wife to return home from a business trip. And in effect, that is truly all that occurs, save for a single pivotal scene that takes place outside of his Lisbon apartment. But that is entirely the point. Because the true story of Your Steps on the Stairs is one relegated to the dark and cobwebbed recesses of memory.

Occurring simultaneously amidst the vividly realized backdrops of an old Portuguese neighborhood and a post 9-11 New York apartment, our protagonist (who remains unnamed until the novel’s gut-punch of a final chapter) slowly descends deeper and deeper into the recollections of a life shared with his wife Cecelia, a neuroscientist. Cecelia, who travels often for her work attending seminars and other scientific gatherings, has made her career studying fear’s effect on the human brain—particularly its ability to process memory. This, which becomes all too clear over the course of the novel, is perhaps the greatest key to unraveling the purpose of Molina’s bold narrative choices. He deftly switches tenses at a blistering rate, dancing between memories twenty years in the past, ten years, five years, before abruptly returning to the present while yet maintaining the verbiage as if this moment in which our protagonist exists is one distantly recalled.

In this way a thoroughly literary novel takes on varying shades of mysterious and thrilling surrealism to a fascinating result. In less seasoned hands, this plot device could have easily fallen apart, rendering the story incomprehensible, but Molina balances precariously atop his artful tightrope, leaving just enough room for the reader to comprehend while still barely clinging to the thin veneer of reality presented. Thus, the reading experience takes on the very same shape as that of the protagonist’s declining mental health. In fact, his decline is so subtle it’s only until the novel’s final few chapters that it truly begins to dawn on the reader that something is terribly, terribly wrong.

Beyond this, Your Steps on the Stairs is a masterful account of isolation, as while the protagonist is living alone, he is also a foreigner living alone in a new country, one whose culture and layout is unsettlingly reminiscent of the city and tumultuous events from which he escaped. His experience during 9-11 looms large as a harbinger for all else to come, as he spends his days watching the news, inundated with apocalyptic imagery and information, and relaying that information with a bizarre tone that’s both clinical and terrified. He reads books Cecelia had gifted however long ago, detailing the cognitive processes of various animals reacting to trauma, before returning to chip away at Captain Cook’s account of his doomed expedition to Antarctica. And it is precisely through this dichotomy that the man’s true state of mind is obtusely revealed. Our protagonist may just be going mad in isolation, hiding from something of which he is so afraid that he simply refuses to confront it. While the world seems to burn around him, so too has he grown content to linger in the apocalypse of his own creation.

Bursting with timely frames of reference, and written with engaging yet deeply meaningful prose, Your Steps on the Stairs is a vibrant contemporary account of loneliness, terror, and the mind’s desperate response to the end of days—whether it be a man’s life as he once knew it, or the world at large.