Plenilunio: Antonio Muñoz Molina’s Crime Novel of a Detective, a Murderer and a Full Moon
Plenilunio ("Full Moon") tells the story of a police inspector who is transferred to a new post in the south of Spain after spending most of his working life under threat from the terrorist group ETA. There he must face a new investigation, the brutal murder of a young girl, and a killer he is convinced he will be able to recognise.
Author: Antonio Muñoz Molina (born 1956, Úbeda, Jaén)
Title: Plenilunio (1997)
Format: Spanish paperback (Seix Barral, Biblioteca Breve), 448 pages; no English translation is currently available on Amazon.es
Scope: Literary crime novel set in a provincial Andalusian city
Amazon: www.amazon.es/dp/8432215732 (ASIN 8432215732)
An Inspector Far from Home
The inspector arrives in a provincial city, obsessed with finding the murderer, and begins a relentless search, driven by the belief that he will be able to see some sign of the crime in the guilty man’s eyes. Over the course of the story he gets back in touch with people from his past, including his old teachers, and falls in love again, so that despite all the difficulties he finds a better life.
Muñoz Molina moves between the investigation, the inspector’s memories and the inner world of the killer, and the result is much more than a whodunit: it is a portrait of fear, guilt and the shadows ETA cast over a whole generation of Spanish police officers.
The Author
Antonio Muñoz Molina was born in 1956 in the province of Jaén into a humble family. At twelve, when many other children were leaving school to start work, he was lucky enough to continue his secondary education, first with the Salesians and then at a state school. Reading was an important part of his childhood, as it has been for so many writers, and by sixteen he had already written his first play.
In Madrid he began studying journalism, hoping to write politically stirring theatre, and met his first disappointments. After a demonstration he was detained by the police, and the fear it gave him was enough to keep him away from any further clandestine activity. He has since become one of the leading Spanish novelists of his generation and a member of the Real Academia Española.
Recognition and Adaptation
Plenilunio was published in 1997 and won France’s Prix Femina for foreign fiction; in 2000 it was adapted for the cinema by Imanol Uribe. It is often described as a crime novel, but the investigation is only one of its threads: the inner lives of the inspector, the young teacher who survives the killer and the elderly priest who once taught the inspector matter as much as the hunt.
Muñoz Molina’s Work
Antonio Muñoz Molina, born in Úbeda in 1956, was elected to the Real Academia Española in 1995 and received the Princess of Asturias Award for Literature in 2013. His other major novels include El invierno en Lisboa, El jinete polaco, Sefarad and La noche de los tiempos, several of which have been translated into English. Plenilunio is a good entry point for readers of Spanish who enjoy long, carefully built literary fiction.
A Note on Style
Muñoz Molina writes long, flowing sentences that follow each character’s thoughts closely. It takes a few pages to settle into the rhythm, but the reward is an unusually intimate portrait of a whole provincial city.
Reading It in Spanish
As far as we can find, Plenilunio has no English edition in print, so the link below is to the Spanish Seix Barral paperback. It is a demanding but rewarding read for intermediate and advanced learners of Spanish; readers who need English can start with Muñoz Molina’s translated novels such as In the Night of Time or Like a Fading Shadow.
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