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the Complete Review
the complete review - fiction



Your Steps on the Stairs

by
Antonio Muñoz Molina


general information | review summaries | our review | links | about the author

To purchase Your Steps on the Stairs


Title: Your Steps on the Stairs
Author: Antonio Muñoz Molina
Genre: Novel
Written: 2019 (Eng. 2025)
Length: 298 pages
Original in: Spanish
Availability: Your Steps on the Stairs - US
Tus pasos en la escalera - US
Your Steps on the Stairs - UK
Your Steps on the Stairs - Canada
Tes pas dans l'escalier - France
Tage ohne Cecilia - Deutschland
Tus pasos en la escalera - España
from: Bookshop.org (US)
  • Spanish title: Tus pasos en la escalera
  • Translated by Curtis Bauer

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Our Assessment:

B+ : well-done

See our review for fuller assessment.



Review Summaries
Source Rating Date Reviewer
El País . 25/3/2019 J.-C. Mainer
TLS . 2/8/2019 E. Ordóñez Angulo


  From the Reviews:
  • "Tus pasos en la escalera es una novela intensa, bien medida en su extensión y narrada en una prosa rica y fluida (pero nunca profusa), sabia en la administración de sus silencios y transiciones, siempre oportuna en la utilización de los inquietantes descubrimientos médicos que tanto tienen que ver con el relato. Recomiendo vivamente leerla de un tirón." - José-Carlos Mainer El País

  • "At first, Tus pasos en la escalera feels narrow and unappealing, despite glances at questions of burning relevance such as climate change and political populism. The language is heavy with cliché. Once the realization dawns that this style mirrors Bruno's character, however, it becomes easier to see the novel as an effective reflection of his tragic self-deceit -- and also, perhaps, of a universal fear of abandonment." - Emmanuel Ordóñez Angulo, Times Literary Supplement

Please note that these ratings solely represent the complete review's biased interpretation and subjective opinion of the actual reviews and do not claim to accurately reflect or represent the views of the reviewers. Similarly the illustrative quotes chosen here are merely those the complete review subjectively believes represent the tenor and judgment of the review as a whole. We acknowledge (and remind and warn you) that they may, in fact, be entirely unrepresentative of the actual reviews by any other measure.

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The complete review's Review:

       Your Steps on the Stairs is narrated by recently retired (well, he was let go from his job ...) Bruno, who has moved from New York City to Lisbon, where he is preparing an apartment they've apparently long owned for the arrival of his wife, the neuroscientist Cecilia, who has a job waiting for her at the Champalimaud Foundation's neuroscience laboratory:

     We were in New York and now we're going to be in Lisbon. For the time being I'm in Lisbon. I'm using my time to make all the preparations for when Cecilia arrives.
       Bruno and Cecilia were brought particularly close together in the wake of the 11 September 2001 attacks, when Cecilia could no longer reach her downtown apartment and moved in with Bruno. Already then:
She wanted to leave New York as soon as possible, resign from her lab position, accept one of the offers that came in from other places around the United States and Europe. She wanted to leave as soon as possible, including leaving everything behind
       It's taken a while, however; it's 2018 now, well into the first Trump administration. Bruno and Cecilia are and remain foreigners, and apparently find New York now even less welcoming:
Even though we had been in the country for so many years we had become more foreign than ever in it and were not participants in its shame. We'd found ourselves in the city in the early days of Bush Jr., but no longer felt like staying in it during the Trump era.
       Bruno also obsesses over the natural and other disasters that seem to be ravaging the world -- and for all his apparent relief at having escaped from the United States and the eager anticipation of Cecilia joining him the novel opens with the dark admission that:
      I've moved to this city to wait for the end of the world.
       [Originally published in Spanish in 2019, the novel -- though anchored in the 11 September attacks -- now reads all the more eerily and discomfitingly in the 2025 United States, post-Covid and in the beginnings of the second Trump-administration.]
       That Bruno has some difficulty letting go of the life he led in New York (despite relief at being freed from a job he never liked) is suggested by the fact that he admits that in readying the apartment: "I wanted to re-create the other apartment in New York in this apartment in Lisbon". Rather than moving on, he in many ways simply wants to transplant and recreate his old life. So also, throughout the narrative, he reminisces a great deal about his life with Cecilia when they were both in New York. As also quickly becomes apparent, for all his talk about his past and future with Cecilia ... well, she's not much of a presence. There's a Waiting for Godot-style feel to his life and preparations -- which can get downright creepy, as when he sets the breakfast table: "two place mats, two cups, two sets of silverware" -- one of the points also where he lets one of his rare visitors believe that Cecilia had already arrived.
       Bruno does have their dog for company -- Luria, as: "Cecilia named Luria after a Soviet neuroscientist who conducted decisive research on memory during World War II" --, but he admits: "I don't have anyone else but Cecilia. I don't need anyone else". Given that Cecilia is, however, ... not around, that seems to be something of a problem now. Bruno's grip on reality seems not quite so sure -- he's lost most sense of time, for example, as he repeatedly mentions --, and in other respects too he seems variously unmoored; Muñoz Molina presents him as very much living in a kind of limbo.
       Cecilia's specialty and expertise are no coïncidence, as Muñoz Molina milks it hard throughout the novel. So, for example, Bruno points out that:
Cecilia says that the brain processes an extremely limited part of the impressions sent to it by our senses, and that our senses themselves only capture some very partial areas of reality, which vary according to the species, so that at every moment and in every place there are several simultaneous worlds.
       Certainly, throughout Your Steps on the Stairs there is a feel that Bruno is living in (or apprehending) his own particular slice of reality, a different world .....
       Later, he quotes Cecilia maintaining that:
There isn't anything that is not an optical illusion. What you see is never the world as it is, neither near nor far away. You see a simulation that your brain constructs from a small number of visual impressions. The brain is locked in the darkness of its bone cave. It receives data from the optic nerve converted into electric impulses and interprets them by contrasting them with previous models it has on file. Everything you see is a mirage.
       Your Steps on the Stairs is very much a novel of the workings of the mind, especially of a mind dealing with trauma(s). Bruno finds holds -- in these two cities, in particular, as he describes a variety of experiences, both everyday and out of the ordinary -- as well as in the anticipation of Cecilia, whose steps he can practically hear on the stairs ..... Even as he watches reports of all sorts of disasters on television, and understands that: "The end of the world is a common occurrence. An apocalypse could be happening anywhere at this very moment" -- he carves out a safe space, mental as well as (or perhaps more so than ...) real, for himself (and, he hopes, Cecilia ...).
       Your Steps on the Stairs is a novel of delusion -- Bruno's farther-reaching than most, perhaps, but surely only differing by degrees --, and of coping with trauma. It's well done -- not least also in how it captures New York City in the 2010s, as well as contemporary Lisbon.

- M.A.Orthofer, 25 March 2025

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Links:

Your Steps on the Stairs: Reviews: Antonio Muñoz Molina: Other books by Antonio Muñoz Molina under review: Other books of interest under review:

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About the Author:

       Spanish author Antonio Muñoz Molina was born in 1956.

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© 2025 the complete review

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