Restless dead and the fear of an uncertain future in ‘Anoxia’, the new novel by Miguel Ángel Hernández

‘Anoxia’, the new novel by the writer Miguel Ángel Hernández (Murcia, 1977) will hit bookstores on January 15 and is already one of Anagrama’s editorial commitments for 2023. «What is our relationship with the dead? How do we remember them? What dark secrets do the remaining images of them keep? How do we emerge from mourning and face the time that we have left to live?” asks the celebrated author of ‘El dolor de los demás’ (2018), his best-seller, a novel that, in addition, Anagrama has included in his ‘Compacts’ collection.

Dolores Ayala, owner of an old photographic studio that has run out of clients, is the protagonist of ‘Anoxia’, which has a photograph of Marian Calero from Murcia on the cover. Ten years after the tragic death of her husband, according to Anagrama on her website, she receives the most unusual assignment of her entire career: to photograph a deceased person on the day of her burial. Another of the characters in the plot is Clemente Artés, “an eccentric old man obsessed with recovering by all means the ancient tradition of photographing the dead.” From her hand, the book tab advances, “Dolores will delve into this forgotten practice, she will experience the slow time of the daguerreotype and learn that images are necessary to remember those who are no longer there, but she will also discover that some of them keep dark secrets that they should never be revealed and, above all, that there are restless dead that do not stop moving and sometimes pounce on the memory of the living».

Cover of the new book by Miguel Ángel Hernández, ‘Anoxia’, with an image of Marian Calero on the cover.

The world falls apart in this story that will keep readers on edge. Meanwhile, some floods surprise the small coastal town of Dolores and, shortly after, thousands of fish are found dead on the shore of the beach. An incident that is very reminiscent, from the very title, ‘Anoxia’ (1. f. Biol. Almost total lack of oxygen in the blood or in body tissues, according to the RAE), to what happened in the Mar Menor on October 12 of 2019. Then, an episode of anoxia (lack of oxygen in the water) killed thousands of fish and crustaceans on Villananitos beach.

He published the newspaper in LA VERDAD

“The fear of an uncertain future settles in the environment and, while everything collapses around her, Dolores, crossed by grief, tries to find a way to get up and catch her breath through photography,” Anagrama discovers about this book. that Miguel Ángel Hernández has been in the making for years, and whose newspaper he published on Sundays in LA VERDAD. «Nervous and expectant I am. And above all happy and excited. And also grateful – very much – to those who, in one way or another, have contributed to this novel ending up seeing the light”, Hernández said this Tuesday on his social networks when sharing the cover of the book.

«’Anoxia’ is a passionate story about photography, about the limits between life and death, about the mystery of capturing death in an image, in a portrait, in a daguerreotype. Miguel Ángel Hernández uses the world of photography to understand and explore the dimensions of life and death. A wonderful, disturbing, disturbing, magical novel”, affirms the novelist Manuel Vilas (‘Ordesa’, ‘A single life’).

According to Paula Bonet, «Miguel Ángel Hernández keeps us alive despite suspending us over a sea of ​​mud. Reading it we learn that beauty is in the eyes of the one who looks at it and that meat, even dead, may not lose its dignity ». He drags us, says the painter and writer, «with intelligence towards the aesthetic contemplation of inert matter and makes us love not only our own existence. He stirs us, shakes us, wakes us up. He helps us cope with mourning for our loved ones, but above all for what we had to abandon because keeping it meant carrying a burden. It masterfully portrays the repair of a woman who always occupied the space that the social mandate had reserved for her, illuminating the birth of a self that conscientiously feeds the newcomer: an artistic subject who knows the power that comes from knowing that she owns herself and of his gaze.”

Idyll with Anagram

The return of Miguel Ángel Hernández to fiction is a celebration. Because it does so, according to the publisher, “with a subtle and dazzling novel about the borders between life and death, about memory and guilt, about the past that accompanies us and the constant search for the air we need to breathe” . «A novel with the brilliance and framing of a perfect photograph. No one like Miguel Ángel Hernández crosses the plot with art in this way, making us think about our need to fix our gaze, memory and life”, affirms Aroa Moreno Durán (‘La bajamar’).

In Anagrama, the Murcian author has published the novels ‘Escape Attempt’ (Ciudad Alcalá Narrative Award, translated into five languages); ‘El instante de peligro’ (finalist for the XXXIII Herralde Novel Award); ‘The pain of others (Murcian Book of the Year Award), and ‘Anoxia’. Also the short essay ‘El don de la siesta’ (“It made me think of those great side books and short ones that Italo Calvino proposed for our millennium”, wrote Enrique Vila-Matas, ‘El País’).