Running for Your Life: Like a Fading Shadow

There is something about Lisbon that makes for a character.

In the case of LAFS, a place where James Earl Ray managed to jet off to in the snaggle-toothed aftermath of Ray’s murder of Martin Luther King Jr. Also a place where almost twenty years later Antonio Munoz Molina, author of the novel “Like a Fading Shadow,”soaks in the sea air, the unchanging street feel of the Portuguese capital.

What’s reduced here is a labyrinthine dream, a plumbing of the human soul that sets judgment aside for an animal watchfulness. We are dumbstruck in the modern age to fathom, let alone give shape to the drumbeat thump in the mind of a cold-blooded killer, this one perhaps the most famous to ever land on the FBI’s most wanted list.

Next: Running for Your Life: The Falafel Guy