During the first hour of reading the novel In Her Absence by Antonio Munoz Molina, it seemed to be about a solid and reliable man who loses his heart to a passionate but flighty woman; she deigns to marry him, and in the end, she leaves him.  A familiar plot, often seen literature.  But as this wondrous novel of longing and fulfillment unfolded, I realized that Molina has twisted the conventional plot around.  Acceptance and surrender in marriage now take on a new meaning, with new possibilities.  What at first seemed almost a novel of manners changed shape into a novel of marriage: pacts are made and broken, tested and then relinquished.  A woman makes a choice which her husband cannot trust: in the end, he abdicates.  But it is really the woman who has made the larger renunciation.

Molina skates dangerously close to caricature in his characterizations of artist, bureaucrat, muse, but veers off just in time to create living and breathing major and minor characters.  Blanca retains her mystery while becoming engagingly human, Mario is foolish but steady, Naranja is a hoot, and Onesimo is a virtual monster from the deep end of the artsy pool.

Mario may be a bit of a fool but does recognize how good he’s got it:  “for him there could be no greater experience than simply walking home along the same route as always in the knowledge that unlike all the other men he went by in the street — men drinking in bars and talking about soccer with cigarettes in their mouths, men with hungering faces pivoting to watch a woman walk past — he alone had the privilege of desiring beyond all other women the precise woman he had married, and the absolute certainty that when he opened the door of his house, he would find her there.”

Mario may never acknowledge that for all of us the precise person we married has disappeared and that the best marriages continue the desire while welcoming the changes.  But he does have the sense to hold on, steady as ever. Sometimes just holding on is all it takes, and sometimes, it’s not.  I will not give away the ending but I didn’t see it coming.