About the author
Miguel Ángel Hernández is a Spanish writer, art historian and curator best known for his fiction, including the novels Intento de escapada (2013), which won the Premio Ciudad Alcalá de Narrativa and was translated into five languages, and El instante de peligro (2015), which was a finalist for the Premio Herralde de Novela. His novel El dolor de los demás (2018) was selected among the books of the year by El País and The New York Times en Español.
About the book
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 photographic 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.
After the acclaimed El dolor de los demás, Miguel Ángel Hernández returns to fiction with a subtle and 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.
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Anoxia by Miguel Ángel Hernández, published by Anagrama, 2023. 272 pp.
Chapter 1. The Final Image
The dead man is right in front of her, but she’s trying to look at him only in the viewfinder. She keeps her eyes on the image formed by the lens: the gleam of the coppery coffin wood, the bony hands interlaced on his chest, the gold band on the ring finger, the charcoal-grey suit, the clean white shirt, the black tie with silver stripes, and the lifeless face. The pale skin, the marmoreal surface that reflects the light and obliges her to move the camera several times until she secures the perfect angle.
The cold of the small funeral parlour room makes Dolores’ stout body bristle. She should have brought something warm, at least a shawl for her shoulders, to make up for the light silk blouse she is wearing. It didn’t occur to her before leaving the house and now she’s regretting it. The aluminium of the tripod turned cold as soon as she entered, and the camera body is like a block of ice. She noticed when she pressed her cheek against it to check the image through the metal viewfinder. In the end she did bring the Nikon F4. It’s over twenty years old and as heavy as an anvil, but she feels at ease with it. What’s more, it was Luis’s favourite. For some reason, that also weighed on her choice.
She’s not alone in the room. The daughter of the deceased, dressed in formal black, accompanies her in silence. She can’t be much older than her. Sixty, perhaps. Dolores senses her inquisitive glance in each small action she takes. But she prefers to be watched over than to be alone with the body.
She moves around in a silent, unhurried and respectful manner. She asks permission, almost whispering, to move the flowers and make the shot less busy. She props up the wreaths and places the tripod at the right distance. She tries to be quick and to focus on what she’s doing. She is aware of borrowing someone else’s time and interrupting their mourning. For this reason, each slight movement, each gentle press of the shutter, reminds her of the discomfort of the woman who is scrutinising her. The same annoyance she had displayed as soon as Dolores arrived:
‘I’m only doing it to respect my father’s wishes,’ she said curtly, with an acrimonious gesture, before the attendant opened up the display room.
‘But all this nonsense is the work of that crazy old man. Please, be quick and leave soon.’
That crazy old man. The woman’s words have given an image – even if a vague one – to the voice that started all this. The telephone call. Yesterday, late in the afternoon. The deep voice and the unidentifiable accent. And above all the assignment – or rather, the plea – the strangest she had ever received in her career as a photographer.
‘My friend has died,’ the voice said. ‘I promised him one last photograph.’