Anoxia - by Miguel Ángel Hernández (Paperback)

About the Book

"In this mesmerizing psychological novel, a strange job leads a widowed photographer down a rabbit hole where the line between past and present, and the living and the dead blurs. What is our relationship with the dead? How do we remember them? What dark secrets do our images of them hold? How do we emerge from grief to face the time we have left? Ten years after the tragic death of her husband, Dolores Ayala, owner of an old photography studio that has run out of clients, receives the most unusual assignment of her career: to take a portrait of a deceased person on the day of his funeral. Accepting it leads her to meet Clemente Artâes, an eccentric old man obsessed with recovering the ancient tradition of photographing the dead. Under his guidance, Dolores will explore this forgotten practice, experience the slow time of the daguerreotype, and our need for images to remember those who are no longer there. She will also discover that some of them hold dark secrets that should never be revealed and, above all, that the dead never cease to move and sometimes pounce on the memory of the living. Miguel âAngel Hernâandez has written a subtle, dazzling novel about the borders between life and death, about memory and guilt, about the past that stays with us and our constant search for air to breathe"--

Book Synopsis

In this mesmerizing psychological novel, a strange job leads a widowed photographer down a rabbit hole where the line between past and present, and the living and the dead blurs.

What is our relationship with the dead? How do we remember them? What dark secrets do our images of them hold? How do we emerge from grief to face the time we have left?

Ten years after the tragic death of her husband, Dolores Ayala, owner of an old photography studio that has run out of clients, receives the most unusual assignment of her career: to take a portrait of a deceased person on the day of his funeral. Accepting it leads her to meet Clemente Artés, an eccentric old man obsessed with recovering the ancient tradition of photographing the dead. Under his guidance, Dolores will explore this forgotten practice, experience the slow time of the daguerreotype, and our need for images to remember those who are no longer there. She will also discover that some of them hold dark secrets that should never be revealed and, above all, that the dead never cease to move and sometimes pounce on the memory of the living.

Miguel Ángel Hernández has written a subtle, dazzling novel about the borders between life and death, about memory and guilt, about the past that stays with us and our constant search for air to breathe.

Review Quotes

"The macabre and stimulating story of a woman drawn into the world of mortuary photography...Dolores's uncanny feelings build as her town is plagued by floods, giving this exploration of grief a gravitas that edges on the gothic, even as Hernández's style remains sober and satisfyingly understated. This will linger in readers' minds." --Publishers Weekly

"Moody and multi-layered, this novel, like its photography subjects, has earned a long and eerie afterlife." --CrimeReads, The Best International Fiction of the Month

"Anoxia is a lovely, dark, delicately written meditation on grief." --Erika T. Wurth, author of White Horse

"It was with great anticipation that I picked up Anoxia. Hernández has style, depth, humor, penetrating intelligence, and a profound insight of pathos and the modern fable. Anoxia is all at once the endless fall and the endless flight, a shared memory and an entirely new experience." --John Reed, author of Snowball's Chance

"Today, the old art of portraying the dead is disappearing. This novel is a powerful creation that draws on both the materiality of photography and the enigmas of death. Photography is different from the images of our digital age, and its outcome--memory--deals as much with the past as with the present. Death, the source of our work of mourning, does not simply mean loss, since it engenders a new relationship with the dead, who continue haunting our lives. With Anoxia, Walter Benjamin, Roland Barthes, and Susan Sontag have found a literary companion capable of dialoguing with them. An amazing accomplishment." --Enzo Traverso, author of Gaza Faces History

"Set on the storm-lashed Mediterranean coast, Anoxia is a powerful, atmospheric novel that explores grief, art, and the transformative power of creation. As floodwaters reshape the land, Dolores--paralyzed by the loss of her husband--seeks solace in the lost art of daguerreotype photography, which captures not just a tangible image, but the shimmering essence of a moment in time. Dolores begins working with a mysterious older man who collects postmortem images, and learns that by capturing death, she is, paradoxically, reclaiming her own life. In this luminous novel, we follow the story of her awakening. A daringly original novel by one of the most gifted writers of the vibrant contemporary Spanish scene, Anoxia is a gorgeous meditation on the human experience, where art becomes both a vessel for grief and a source of profound, transformational beauty." --Valerie Miles, author of A Thousand Forests in One Acorn

"Miguel Ángel Hernández writes novels that integrate a gripping fabula with one or more important theoretical issues. While reading the engaging story, the reader cannot help but absorb relevant ideas about social-political reality as well as aesthetic questions. The literary quality matches the level of thinking. In Anoxia this concerns the combination of the art of photography with the personal effort of memory. Once you read all his novels you will have acquired unique insights that are indispensable but difficult to learn through teaching and studying." --Mieke Bal, author of Narratology and Quoting Caravaggio

"An enthralling story about photography, and the limits between life and death." --ABC Cultural

"In Anoxia...[Hernández] has achieved the perfect equilibrium...The tradition of mortuary photography drives a mysterious plot that flirts with the thriller, though the greatest value lies in the subtlety with which Hernández tackles the emotional consequences of grief." --El Cultural

About the Author

Miguel Ángel Hernández is a Spanish writer best known for his works of fiction, among them the novels Intento de escapada (2013), which won the Premio Ciudad Alcalá de Narrativa and was translated into five languages, El instante de peligro (2015), which was a finalist for the Premio Herralde de Novela, and El dolor de los demás (2018), which was selected as a book of the year by El País and the New York Times en Español. Hernández teaches art history at the University of Murcia and has authored several books on art and visual culture.

Adrian Nathan West is a writer and literary critic based in Spain. He has translated more than twenty books, among them Rainald Goetz's Insane and Sibylle Lacan's A Father: Puzzle.