Book Nook - Anoxia: A Novel

 ANOXIA: A Novel (Other Press Trade Paperback Original; On Sale 2/4/25), the latest from award-winning Spanish writer Miguel Ángel Hernández, is a mesmerizing psychological novel about grief, how we remember those we have lost, and the power of photography to save memory, heal and save. ANOXIA spins an absorbing tale of a strange job, centered on photographing the dead, that leads a widowed photographer down a rabbit hole where the line between past and present, and the living and the dead, blurs. Miguel Ángel Hernández became interested in postmortem photography after seeing The Others, by Alejandro Amenabar, in 2001. A moment, in which Nicole Kidman consults an album of photographs in which everyone is dead, left an indelible mark on him. He became fascinated by this tradition of photographing the dead and started to read and document about the process. Hernández came to realize that it was not a macabre practice, but something natural, an act of love and memory. Then then pandemic hit in 2020, so many died alone and others could not see their loved ones die. He became aware of how important images were to mourn. Concurrently, he’d been deeply troubled by the destruction of the Mar Menor territory, a small lake in the Mediterranean that is being destroyed by human action, constant storms and inundations as a consequence of climate change. Home was becoming uncertain for the inhabitants of these places. When he saw a photograph of the thousands of dead fish by “anoxia” on the shores of that small sea, he realized that it was also a postmortem photograph. So the story he wanted to tell, that of a photographer drawn to take photographs of the dead, coincided with other death: the death of the territory. Thus the intertwining of these themes in his ambitious coming novel about death, loss, and art, ANOXIA.

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 that returns to the strange tradition of postmortem photography and brings it into the present, delivering a tale about the borders between life and death, memory and guilt, a past that clings to us and our constant search for air to breathe. Because ANOXIA is also a story about the destruction of territory, the threat of climate change and the feeling of uncertainty it produces in us, it also serves as a novel about "solastalgia", that feeling of helplessness we have when home becomes an unstable space. With hints of the reflections on grief and memory from Annie Ernaux, Roland Barthes’ Camera Lucida and Susan Sontag’s On Photography, character construction in the vein of J.M. Coetzee, Colm Tóibín, and Siri Hustvedt, and a cinematic resonance with Six Feet Under and the Japanese film Departures, ANOXIA is ultimately a ghost novel without ghosts. A story full of shadows and reverberations of the past, dead people coming back through memory, and stories full of secrets that cannot be revealed. I hope to stay in contact with you about possibilities for it.

A few takeaways from ANOXIA:

• It is a novel about grief, about the experience of losing a loved one and about the ways we have of remembering. In this sense, it is a novel that reflects upon the need to visualize the death of others. In our society, death and grief are immediately out of the way. Grief is medicalized and hidden. This novel speaks of the need to make it evident, to also generate spaces for pain and grief.

• It is also a novel about ancient photography. Both about the forgotten photographic practice of postmortem photography and about daguerreotype and other analog photographic techniques. Sure to interest lovers of photography and art in general. To all those interested in images. It talks about the images that matter, the images that heal and save. So it is a novel that is at the same time a theory of the image. The slow image versus the fast image, the corporal and tactile image versus the digital one.

• It can be understood as a social novel, which talks about what is happening in contemporary Spain after the crisis. In this sense, it talks about climate change and the disasters of the anthropocene era. The Mar Menor catastrophe, the death of fish on the shore, global warming.... a novel about the disaster to come and the ways we have to face it.

• It is a novel about the empowerment of a mature woman. A woman who has always lived in the shadow of her husband and now finds her own way. It speaks to the challenges of the mother who loves her son, who keeps memory, but who also looks for a way to continue living. In fact, this is the strength of Dolores' character, beyond her work as a photographer: her need to breathe again, to fight against her own anoxia.

• Finally, it is a novel with intrigue: What secret do the images of the dead hold? Who are the restless ones? How far can one go to take a perfect photograph, a photograph that brings life and death together in the same place?

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.

About the Translator: 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.