The republication of a celebrated writer’s early novels allows readers to discover the foundations from which his literary career began to take shape. This is the case with Eyes in the Night, the title with which Penguin Pocket reissues Premonition, first published in 2003, the second novel by industrial engineer and writer Jorge Molist (Barcelona, 1951), one of the most recognized and awarded names in our historical narrative.
Although written more than two decades ago, the novel retains its power to captivate the reader. In its pages we find the hallmarks that would characterize the author from Barcelona in his later work: a carefully crafted prose in which dialogue construction stands out, solid plots, protagonists with strong personalities, especially female ones, a successful blend of genres, and a lively narrative rhythm. Special mention deserves the integration of supernatural phenomena and elements that end up forming part of the plot with natural ease.
Alongside this, his ability to recreate settings, blend documentary with fiction, and explore human passions,
qualities that help explain the international success of some of his novels, translated into dozens of languages.
Beyond intrigue and suspense, Eyes in the Night holds a particularly interesting reflection: the persistence of cultural and spiritual mestizaje born from the encounter between the Spaniards who arrived in the Americas and the Indigenous peoples, a blend that transcended blood, language, and customs to reach the most intimate and enduring realm of societies: their beliefs.
Molist takes us to Santa Águeda, a remote town in Baja California, where Anselmo, the last great shaman, and Don Agustín, a Catholic priest, have spent more than two decades clashing over the spiritual leadership of their people. Two men who symbolize traditions that seem irreconcilable: the ancestral Indigenous beliefs and the Catholic faith inherited from those who, five centuries ago, brought Christianity to the New World, a confrontation that divides the community between supporters of one side and the other.
Here lies, in my view, one of the novel’s greatest achievements. The author lets us discover that, beneath the differences in rites and symbols, both traditions share spiritual concerns: the search for answers to the unknown, the belief in a reality that transcends the material, and the need to relate to the sacred—convergences that, without erasing their doctrinal differences, help to understand how the meeting of two worlds fostered confrontations, exchanges, and adaptations that ended up shaping a mestizo society.
Eyes in the Night is not an essay on religious anthropology. It is, above all, a novel conceived to recreate a concrete world, and Molist shows that he knows how to build a highly entertaining story.
In a parallel plot, set in Los Angeles, Lucía, the shaman’s granddaughter, has inherited an extraordinary gift that manifests through the so-called “visions,” experiences related to visions and omens that resemble astral journeys. It is ancestral power that arouses the interest of those who discover in it an opportunity to fulfill their ambitions.
From there on, religion, money, passion, seduction, and violence intertwine in a story where the supernatural coexists with business interests and mafia-like conduct. The Barcelona-born writer handles these ingredients with the skill that would ultimately make him one of the most successful authors in Spanish-language historical fiction. He demonstrates with confidence that he knows how to construct a plot full of growing momentum, unexpected twists, and a structure that could easily become a successful cinematic script. It is true that in the Californian thread the antagonists of the business world are drawn in a fairly predictable way. They are the traits of an author who was still refining his style, but they hardly stain the pace or the gripping quality of the whole.
Jorge Molist acknowledged in the acknowledgments that he drew inspiration from behaviors and situations he encountered during his tenure as an executive at a multinational on the West Coast of the United States—a experience that lends verisimilitude to the novel’s business world and allows for a contrast between California’s economic modernity, the reality across the border in Baja California, and how ancient beliefs endure.
In this territory where Hispanic and Indigenous heritages have long intertwined, Molist builds a fiction that reminds us that political borders do not always align with cultural ones and certainly not with spiritual ones.
At the close of Eyes in the Night I enjoyed a mystery novel with its share of intrigue, passions, and excessive ambitions. But I also recognized Jorge Molist, who, over the years, has won millions of readers in dozens of countries with stories in which adventure and great human passions coexist with the weight of history. I dare say that the author aimed to pay tribute to the persistence of Indigenous beliefs while confronting us with a spiritual mystery open to different interpretations: it could have really happened, or could be a product of suggestion, or reflect forces and beliefs that lie beyond our understanding.
Because, ultimately, this novel reminds us that five centuries of mestizaje did not erase the beliefs of those who found themselves in America. They transformed them, interwove them, and kept them alive. Perhaps because, beyond rites, symbols, and doctrines, two men opposed in their understanding of God may be seeking, perhaps unknowingly, the same answers.
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Author: Jorge Molist. Title: Eyes in the Night. Publisher: Penguin Pocket. Availability: Todos tus libros.