Adrian Nathan West brings Miguel Ángel Hernàndez’s latest dark, strange, and touching novel to its first release in English. Anoxia was originally published in Spanish in 2023 and received excellent reviews from the European market.
Books about death, dying, and grief seem to keep finding me. If I wasn’t such a skeptic, I’d say it was the Universe trying to help me cope after I lost my mother to breast cancer and endured a series of nonconsequential health scares after but it’s probably just a coincidence. In some ways, Hernàndez’s novel reminds me of Emily Haback’s Shark Heart only with real creepy photography instead of a woman helplessly watching her loved ones morph into sharks and reptiles.
Dolores Ayala is in her tenth year of mourning her husband’s unexpected death in a car accident when she meets Clemente Artès, who helps rekindle her love of photography. But not everyone approves of the subjects Clemente encourages Dolores to photograph: the dead on the day of their funeral.
Even though Clemente shares little about his past, and though his preferred choice of subject is strange, Dolores senses a level of intimacy that has been missing from her life. However, as Clemente pulls her deeper into his world, Dolores stumbles upon a few photographs that shake her: Could her new friend be a murderer?
Death is a part of the living experience most of us would rather not dwell on, but anyone who has experienced loss knows it’s a reality we can’t avoid. Our time on this planet is limited and the same goes for people we love.
As we follow Dolores on her journey through her friendship with Clemente and her transformation from mourning the life she had before and embracing the possibilities of what her life can be, Hernàndez invites us to explore the aspects of grief that nobody likes to talk about. Even though Dolores misses her husband, she can’t forgive herself for the fact that she was angry with him on the day he died until she sees her experience mirrored in Clemente’s complicated past. Hernàndez also conveys Dolores’s sense of being haunted by her husband’s memory in her tendency to hang onto spaces she doesn’t need like her summer house: “[He] is still there. More than anywhere else.”
With the rising popularity of digital photography, dark room work is less common, especially for labor intensive processes like producing daguerreotypes. But in Anoxia, Hernàndez gives us a lovely glimpse of Dolores working in the dark room: “She liked the ritual. The sacred silence. The red shadow. The dark, endless evening.” Normally, I don’t love words like endless describing a part of the daily cycle that obviously ends, but like so many of the sentences in this work, translator Adrian Nathan West captures the rhythm of the original language.
Given the dark subject matter, this novel probably isn’t for everyone, but I think it is a love letter to traditions that help us live with the unknowns of death and dying, and cope with the parts we do know. I enjoyed joining Dolores on her journey from defining her normal state as “inertia” to accepting her complicated grief and learning to let go of the things that keep her from moving forward and embracing her life.
Publisher: Other Press
Publication date: February 4, 2025
Reviewed by Amy Armstrong
Amy Armstrong is a psychotherapist in Aurora, CO. She loves to write and read in her spare time. Amy has been a selector and judge for the Colorado Book Awards for the past two years. She is currently co-editing the 2026 anthology for Rocky Mountain Fiction Writers.