Death will come and read your books

On January 6, 2015, Iván de la Nuez unknowingly collected his own death certificate. They issued it to him at the Necrological Services in Havana, where he had traveled to arrange the papers proving the death of his father, who had died a few days before. When that same day he went to write him off in the Supply Book, an official took the certificate and said: “My love, my love, have you taken a good look at who is dead in this document?” The dead man, oh, it was him.

That administrative error became a real headache for the Cuban writer living in Barcelona, ​​since from the beginning he sensed that leaving his country of origin while dead would not be an easy thing. But at the same time he gave her an idea of ​​no small relevance: “What else can happen to me, if I’m already dead?” And this freedom of thought, this certainty that nothing worse could happen to him in life and that no one dared to reproach a dead person for anything, gave him the wings to write Posmo (Consonni , 2023), a short essay in which, from from the aforementioned anecdote, he reflects on the society that we have all built or, rather, destroyed. By the way, the word that gives the book its title, postmo, is not the abbreviation of postmodernity, but of post mortem.

This is not the first time a writer has been wrongly presumed dead – in fact, newspapers have done so on multiple occasions – but it may never have happened before that a zombie has personally promoted his memories from beyond the grave. Luckily, Iván de la Nuez has not traveled alone through the ultraworld of bookstores. Because, throughout the last year, a huge number of authors have flirted, literary speaking, with death. And it is that, since the outbreak of the pandemic in our lives, and in parallel to the outbreak of the war in Ukraine, the expiration of our bodies has become a recurring theme on news tables.

At first, it seemed that the coronavirus crisis would lead to an avalanche of dystopian novels, but what has really awakened is a kind of fervor for death literature. (See in this same supplement Stories of mourning, 04/09/2022). Let’s look at some recent fiction: The River of Ashes (Tusquets), in which Rafael Reig introduces us to an old man confined to a nursing home during the pandemic; Any summer is an end (Alfaguara), in which Ray Loriga sets in motion a series of characters on the brink of death; The voices of Adriana (Random House), in which Elvira Navarro talks about the disappearance of her parents; Landing / Aterratge (Transit / Club Editor), in which Eva Piquer describes the way in which people try to overcome duels; and so with Andrés Barba, Begoña Méndez, Miguel Ángel Hernández…

Death has not only reached autofiction, but it could be said that it has completely covered it. Classics of recent literature such as El año del pensamiento mágic / L’any del pensament màgic (Random House, 2015) by Joan Didion, Nivels de vida / Nivells de vida (Anagrama, 2014 / Angle, 2017) by Julian Barnes, Duel (Libros del Asteroid, 2018) by Eduardo Halfon or The ridiculous idea of ​​never seeing you again (Seix Barral, 2013) by Rosa Montero, all those titles have been added that, in addition to talking about the final hour, address the importance of mourning , especially in circumstances as extreme as those that occurred during the pandemic. “It is a truism to say that death is a universal theme,” says Marta Sanz, whose Metallic Shutters go down suddenly (Anagrama) confront the reader, among other issues, with the horror of neglected old age before, during and after the 2020 confinement , and with the current dismantling of the health system by the public powers–, but it must be recognized that in recent years it has become so stubborn and has hit us so hard that it has gained enormous prominence in contemporary narrative”.

That the aforementioned titles coincide at the present time is justified by two arguments: one, enough time has passed for the authors to have been able to calmly reflect on the impact that those events had on our lives, and two, the citizens , and especially the mourners, are already prepared to face texts that reflect on events that particularly affected them. An example of this second point can be found in VilaPensa, the Penedés Thought Festival (Barcelona) which, after years of mulling over the possibility, has dedicated the 2023 edition to the theme of death. According to its director, Jordi Sàbat, “it seemed to us that this was the ideal moment to bring up the subject. We had wanted to address it for years, but we did not want to do so until we were sure that the public had fully come to terms with the consequences of the pandemic and that, consequently, we were all prepared to look back and reflect on the way in which it has changed our relationship with death.

One of the most important consequences that the pandemic had on our lives was the impossibility of saying goodbye to our dead. The confinement and sanitary measures prevented us from going to funeral homes or cemeteries in a traditional way, and still today many people regret not having been able to kiss their loved ones for the last time. The Nigerian writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie already wrote in 2021 her memorial essay On mourning / On pain (Random House / Fanbooks), in which she narrated her despair at the impossibility of traveling to her native country to bury her father , died suddenly. Her brother sent her a photo of the deceased on her mobile and the author understood that the 21st century had become just that: a bunch of pixels as a response. “During the pandemic, many people left and we couldn’t even be by their side,” says Miguel Ángel Hernández, whose novel Anoxia (Seix Barral) precisely rescues the old custom of photographing the deceased. In those days we all became aware of the fragility of life and I think that contemporary literature has taken good note of all of this. The authors have started to narrate and make death visible”.

It is interesting to see how important it is for us to physically accompany our deceased on their last journey, especially considering that death has now become a kind of fiction for the new generations. “Never like now have young people seen so few deaths in the real world, but so many in the virtual one,” says Ferrán Sáez, writer and professor of Philosophy at the Blanquerna-Ramon Llull University, as well as a speaker at VilaPensa. There are deaths on television, in video games, on social networks… But not in reality. Today parents prevent their children from going to the funeral home so that they are not shocked by seeing a dead relative, but all they achieve is that they grow up with an abnormal relationship with death. And it is a huge problem. Because if we put death in the same place where unicorns live, when it really comes we will be unable to accept it.

This inability to accept the end of life as normal was probably one of the reasons why the pandemic hit all of us so hard, and especially those who had their elders in nursing homes or their relatives far from home. Having distanced ourselves from such a natural phenomenon as our own expiration and, also, no longer having the support of religion to console us, many mourners turned to literature seeking answers to one of the three great questions of the human being: where are we going? In France, for example, the publication of Living with our dead / Viure amb els nostres morts (Books of the Asteroid / Column, 2022) has been a true publishing phenomenon, memoirs in which the French rabbi Delphine Horvilleur recounts her experience consoling, to through the sacred texts of the Jewish tradition, to the parishioners who were in the process of mourning. The book has been a post-pandemic phenomenon that has surprised even the author herself, who has acknowledged in an interview that the current awareness of our fragility has awakened ghosts that we had cornered.

Horvilleur has denounced on many occasions that, once the influence of religion has been lost in society, people no longer know where to go to talk about the loss of family members and that, perhaps, now they turn to literature in search of consolation. . In fact, another very frequent phenomenon today is that of the writer who, after the death of his parents, reconstructs his life in a fiction. Internationally, we have just read Primera sangre / Primera sang (Anagram), in which Amélie Nothomb imagines her father’s life before she herself was born, and Saturno / Saturn (Gatopardo / Periscopi, 2022), in which Sarah Chiche did the same with hers. In Spain, we have the family confessions of Eider Rodríguez, Miguel Ángel Oeste and, among many others, Laura Ferrero. “Death begins to become strong among authors who are between the ages of forty and fifty-five: because we get sick, because our parents die or because we even lose our children,” says Elvira Navarro. It is impossible that, when an experience of this importance rears its head or claws at us, we do not reflect it in our writing”.

Death, logically, has always been there. In our lives and in our bookstores. There are titles that became classics as soon as they came off the printer, such as A History of Death in the West (Cliff, 2005) by Philippe Ariès, Semper dolens (Cliff, 2003, 2015) by Ramón Andrés or The Undertaker (Alfaguara, 2004) by Thomas Lynch, and there are others that have immediately aroused the interest of readers, such as La muerte contada por un sapiens a un neardental (Alfaguara), in which Juan Luis Arsuaga and Juan José Millás establish a dialogue between science and the humanities that , among other reflections, leads them to conclude that we live installed in a post-future, that is, in a world that demands from science the answers that it previously asked from religion.

On this level, it is also worth highlighting a book, All Deaths (Crítica), in which the physicist and biologist Ricard Solé reminds us that not only people die, but also other complex systems –languages, robots, even information – that, to the extent that they are human constructions, they also fall into decay, become obsolete or simply disappear. “The pandemic made my vision of science change,” says the author. Now I understand that humans will also cry when the robots with which we will live in the near future break down. Because the loss of a machine with which we have spent many hours, just as it happens with pets or even with certain people, also implies the death of our own past”. There is little left, then, for us to cry even for the silence of Artificial Intelligence.