Between the Moon and Rural Spain in 1969: Antonio Muñoz Molina’s El viento de la Luna

This essay presents the analysis of the novel El viento de la Luna (2006), by the Spanish author Antonio Muñoz Molina, discussing the importance of the Moon as a privileged metaphor for distant scenarios and imagined worlds, which become instrumental when representing individual and collective identity building. The novel brings together the description of the daily life in a small village of the Spanish countryside and the episode of the first human landing on the Moon. The protagonist narrates, retrospectively, his coming of age as a teenager in the 1960s and his story highlights the striking contrasts between the ancestral rhythm of life in a deeply rural community of southern Spain and the allure caused by the technological progress symbolized by the mission of the spacecraft Apollo XI. This essay aims at exploring the way these contrasts are built throughout the novel, elaborating not only on the opposition between rurality and progress, but also on the influence of literacy and mass media in the changes undergone by the Spanish rural society in the late 1960s. Moreover, it will be analysed how the process of individual and collective identity building is presented as the result of the interplay between near family and community context, and utter distance symbolized by the Moon.