Five years ago, Antonio Muñoz Molina’s novel “Sepharad” was published in English to rapturous reviews. Not since W.G. Sebald’s “The Emigrants” had a new European writer so powerfully seized the imagination of American readers. “Sepharad” was, in fact, a kind of transposition, into Spanish history and language, of Sebald’s masterpiece — with its blending of fact and fiction, its obsession with the horrors of the 20th century, and its deeply ethical insistence on retrieving individual stories obliterated by history. In a fluid, even slippery narrative, Mr. Muñoz Molina braided the stories of Sephardic Jews, exiled from Spain in the 15th century, with the experiences of Spaniards during that country’s civil war, and the more public lives of figures such as Franz Kafka. I’m not sure how many people read “Sepharad” — it was not the kind of book that makes a best seller — but it helped to give Mr. Muñoz Molina the literary stature in America that he has long enjoyed in Spain, where the 52-year-old is one of the leading writers of his generation.

Now, with the publication of “A Manuscript of Ashes” (Harcourt, 305 pages, $25), we have the chance to read the book that launched Mr. Muñoz Molina’s career as a novelist. First published in Spain in 1986 under the title “Beatus ille,” now translated into English by Edith Grossman, “A Manuscript of Ashes” shows that some of Mr. Muñoz Molina’s central concerns were with him from the very beginning. Once again we find him investigating Spain’s damaged past — in particular, the violence and betrayals of the Spanish Civil War, and the fear and tedium of the Franco dictatorship that succeeded it. Again he is tormented by the pastness of the past, which makes it impossible to know reliably, as well as by its continuing presence, which makes our own lives seem like mere sequels to great events that happened long ago. And already in his first novel, we can now see, Mr. Muñoz Molina was experimenting with a narrative technique adequate to these perceptions. “A Manuscript of Ashes” is divided between two narrators and at least three time frames, and the reader must be constantly on the alert for multiple shifts of perspective, sometimes in the space of a single paragraph.

Yet “A Manuscript of Ashes,” as one might expect of a first novel, is on the whole a more conventional book than “Sepharad.” Where the later book exploded genre, the earlier one remains within the familiar conventions of the detective story. The detective, in this case, just happens to be living a generation after the murder he is investigating took place. Minaya, the novel’s naïve protagonist, is a student rebel in the late 1960s — which in Madrid, unlike in Berkeley or Paris, means that he is an enemy of the state. When we first meet him, he has just been released from jail, where he was brutally interrogated. He is left suffering from what Mr. Muñoz Molina suggests is a spiritual syndrome of men under dictatorship: “an unpleasant sensation of impotence and helpless solitude … forever denied the right to salvation, rebelliousness, or pride.”

It is at this vulnerable moment that Minaya first hears the name of Jacinto Solana, a talented but unknown poet who fought on the Republican side during the Civil War. Solana published just a few verses in left-wing newspapers before he was taken captive in 1939; soon after his release from prison, in 1947, he was tracked down by Franco’s troops and killed. In his bravery and his ultimate failure, he strikes Minaya as a kindred spirit, “blind, bold, fearless, between the legs of the Cyclops that takes a step and squashes them without even noticing.” Solana represents a lost Republican inheritance, which the Franco regime prevents Minaya and his generation from claiming.

In a more personal sense, too, Minaya claims Solana as his own. For as he soon learns, the poet’s best friend was his uncle, Manuel, and his great poems were written at Manuel’s house in the provincial city of Magina, which Minaya remembers from his childhood as a magical palace. When the young man decides to return to Magina and move in with his uncle, to research Solana’s life for his doctoral dissertation, he learns that the poet’s story is even darker than he knew. For Manuel and Solana were rivals for the love of Mariana, a beautiful artist’s model, and Manuel emerged the victor. But only for one night: The morning after Manuel and Mariana were married, on May 21, 1937, the bride was killed. She was standing by the window when soldiers, pursuing a fugitive over the rooftops, accidentally shot her in the forehead.

Ever since, Minaya discovers, Manuel’s life has been a living death, symbolized by the nuptial chamber that he has preserved untouched for more than 30 years. It is while trespassing in this room that Minaya discovers the manuscript of Solana’s last book, titled “Beatus ille,” which everyone thought had been destroyed by the soldiers who killed him. Much of the novel’s second half consists of passages from this manuscript, as Solana gradually, suspensefully unveils the true story of what happened in Magina 30 years ago.

As this summary makes clear, Mr. Muñoz Molina is not afraid of full-blooded melodrama. Mariana’s untouched bedroom is clearly inspired by Miss Havisham’s wedding dress; the bride for one night is like a figure in a folktale; as a child, Solana even dreams of himself as the Count of Monte Cristo. So it is hardly surprising when the reader discovers that, as in a Sherlock Holmes story, the details of Mariana’s death don’t quite add up. If she was shot from outside the window, as the official account has it, then why was there dirt on the front of her nightgown, as though she had fallen forward? And what about the spent cartridge found on the floor of the room, which Minaya discovers among Solana’s personal effects?

The house, in fact, is teeming with sinister characters who could easily fit the role of villain. There is the sculptor Utrera, an old drunk who has prostituted his gift to the Franco regime; and there is Dona Elvira, Manuel’s embittered old mother, who never comes down from her bedroom lair. It even begins to seem that Solana and Manuel, too, might have motives for murder. Solana, Minaya discovers, loved Mariana for years but was never brave enough to declare himself. Could jealousy of her marriage to his best friend have led the poet to kill? Did Manuel find out that, on the night before the wedding, Solana and Mariana finally acted on their passion?

There is something rapturously Gothic about the whole setup, and Mr. Muñoz Molina’s prose, as translated by Ms. Grossman, is correspondingly purple. The book is written in incantatory run-on sentences, intoxicated with sensual details, whether the subject is the Spanish landscape or the body of Ines, Minaya’s lover: “Urged on by the dark breath that had revived more deeply when he was drinking from her womb, he moved up to her breasts, her chin, her mouth, the damp hair that covered her cheekbones, and then he felt that he was disappearing, quivering motionless, lucid, suspended at the edge of a sweetness from which there was no return.” If this kind of writing strikes you as overwrought — if you can’t help hearing a Hollywood soundtrack swell when Minaya tells Ines, “Now I don’t care if I die. If you offered me a cup of poison right now, I’d drink it down” — then “A Manuscript of Ashes” is likely to leave you with a lyrical hangover.

But below the romantic surface, Mr. Muñoz Molina raises more complex questions about history and memory. He reportedly began writing “Beatus ille” after Franco’s death in 1975, and Minaya’s quest is clearly an allegory for a generation emerging from dictatorship, in search of its own truths about the past. So, too, the house in which the novel takes place — old, majestic, claustrophobic, haunted — is a version of Spain itself. This symbolic dimension is what lends real weight to the novel’s otherwise contrived final twist. The past, Mr. Muñoz Molina implies, is never as dead as we think, and the stories it tells us are never free of hidden agendas. “A Manuscript of Ashes” shows Mr. Muñoz Molina already on the track of these themes, which remain at the heart of his work a quarter-century later.

akirsch@nysun.com