Five top novels of existential shipwreck

Peter Mann is the author of the novels The Torqued Man (2022) and World Pacific (2025). A longtime resident of San Francisco, he grew up in Kansas City, went to Wesleyan University, and got a PhD in Modern European history before becoming a novelist and a cartoonist.

[Q&A with Peter Mann; The Page 69 Test: The Torqued Man]

At The Strand Magazine Mann tagged "five great, albeit wildly different, novels that explore the theme of existential shipwreck and the drama of staying afloat." One title on the list:

In the Night of Time by Antonio Muñoz Molina (2009)

Similar themes of war and exile here, only this is a novel about the Spanish Civil War and is a work of historical fiction, which always sounds like a stupid qualification, as if great fiction weren’t often historical in its focus (War and Peace? Blood Meridian? The Singapore Grip? Come on.) What I mean is that Muñoz Molina, unlike Seghers, is writing his story at some seventy years’ remove from the events portrayed. But it is to my knowledge, with the possible exception of Javier Cercas’s slim but brilliant Soldiers of Salamis, the best novel about the Spanish Civil War. It captures the shipwreck of an entire nation, and with it the millions of lives shattered and set adrift. In a sweeping, richly textured story of an architect fleeing Madrid for New York, recalling the fragments of his life in Spain leading up to the war, Muñoz Molina gives the reader not only a sense of how a society tears itself apart and the acute dispossession experienced by those who live through it, but how that sense of shipwreck persists even once you’ve reached the other shore.

Read about another entry on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue