Sonia Hernandez [Granta's Best of Young Spanish-Language Novelists]

As we mentioned a few Fridays ago, we’re going to spend the next 3 days highlighting all of the authors selected for Granta’s _“Best of Young Spanish-Language Novelists” special issue. All past and future posts related to this issue can be found by clicking here.

Today we’re featuring Spanish author Sonia Hernandez. Samantha Schnee translated her story “The Survivor” for this issue.

Since Samantha Schnee is one of the founding editors of Words Without Borders, and the translator of Sonia Hernandez’s “The Survivor,” makes this as good a post as any to point out that Words Without Borders is maybe the best place to visit for more stories from Spanish-language novelists. I’m pretty sure any and every person reading this is already familiar with their site, but in case you’re not, it’s worth noting that WWB is fricking awesome. Not just for their new content (a new issue comes out every month), but for their extensive archive, which becomes more and more impressive all the time as these authors move from being discovered by WWB, to getting U.S. book deals, to becoming cult and cultural phenomenons. And the WWB archive can be searched and sorted in dozens of ways, including by country.

Sonia Hernandez is featured on the Granta website where she talks about the writers she currently admires (James Joyce, Italo Svevo, Enrique Vila-Matas, Melania G. Mazzucco and Siri Hustvedt), her literary criticism, and her sort of adverse relationship to the Internet:

Do you have your own web page?

No – I find it dangerous how easy it is for writings from the personal sphere or literary gossip can become published on the Internet.

Yes, yes it is easy. And dangerous. But anywho . . .

That same link also has a very short piece by Stewart O’Nan about Hernandez’s story:

“The Survivor“’s a funny story, and I don’t mean just comic, something that made me laugh as I found myself agreeing with its logic, though I did that more and more the deeper I got into it, but funny in the way it’s put together, that initial metaphysical heaviness – since we’re talking about existence and its lack of meaning – giving way as the narrator goes from person to person like Chekhov’s sadsack hack driver, trying to find someone close to him who finds his life of value, to the running cosmic joke, at once pathetic and terrifying, that he might as well have died, or perhaps not even lived (his great achievement providing affordable couches for the asses of Spain). It’s a tale of dis-ease that leaves the reader chuckling uneasily. We’ve survived it, yes, but now we have to do something with the rest of our lives.

And to give you a taste, here’s the opening:

I should have died six years ago. On 16 July 1999. That’s what Dr Castro said. A medical doctor. Marisa, my wife, was with me and she stared furiously at the doctor, as if the woman said I had been dead for six years. Perhaps that’s what she actually said, and I misheard her. My mind went blank. There were a few seconds of silence, like those moments of uncertainty when you awaken in someone else’s bed. In a way, I was awakening to a life that wasn’t mine.

Dr Castro half smiled. She’s a rather unfortunate woman, physically: too skinny, a sharp nose, large but glassy eyes. News like that should come from a more attractive woman, or a man, a corpulent, taciturn physician who would leave no room for doubt. ‘What I mean is that you’re very fortunate,’ she added. I’m very lucky, according to my physician.

After a few more instructions about my upcoming endoscopy and prescribed echocardiogram, we left her office. Marisa began to babble nervously, on the brink of a hysterical outburst, the kind she usually has when things don’t go as she’s planned. For a moment, I felt guilty; this vague, confusing terrain where Dr Castro had dumped me was a great inconvenience to our life together, a life which had cost us so much effort to build. I supposed that for Marisa it must have been a huge problem, not to know whether or not her husband had died, or worse, not to understand why I hadn’t died according to plan on 16 July 1999.

Suddenly, I realized that the logorrhoea, the rhetoric, the flattery and the timid reproaches that poured forth from my wife upon exiting the doctor’s office were nothing more than words intended to fill my mind – my immediate memory – to prevent me from dwelling on that strange diagnosis which had made me into a rebellious patient. My other memory – the mediate, or deep, or whatever it’s called – was different. There the lights were still off, that sense of strangeness of a hotel bed, the descent into an abyss – they weren’t melodramatic but made no sense. Marisa was livid about the doctor’s lack of tact, and repeated her rather pragmatic question, ‘Why on earth would she tell you that now? The accident and the operation belong to a very difficult chapter in our lives, why would she want to torment us with the possibility of what might have happened?’ Few people survive an accident like the one I had and, according to Dr Castro, no one survives an operation with complications like that.

Marisa decided that after the visit with the doctor, I wasn’t fit to go to the factory, so we went home and let the day run its normal course. I went to Pepe’s bar for a while, spoke with the regulars and put a coin or two into the slot machine, nothing special. I thought about telling everyone what the doctor had told me, to see how they’d react, but I stopped myself because it would have legitimized the joke she made at my expense. It was later that night, as we were watching television, that I began to think about the past six years, a gift of sorts from Providence, God, science, chance or my body. I realized that the whole time, I had been living irresponsibly. It’s a fact that after the operation Dr Cabrol, the surgeon, had said the situation was touch and go. And the days in the ICU were nothing but a fog, followed by a convalescence in our apartment in Altea before returning to real life in September. I went back to work against doctors’ orders because at the time I was indispensable at the factory. After years of toil and misery, we had finally managed to become one of the main sofa manufacturers, and I couldn’t leave everything hanging, especially after my brother Ramón had washed his hands of the business, more concerned with discovering Taoism and the truth of Zen. Returning to work was the first of my mistakes. For some strange reason, my body insisted on continuing to function; in other words, I had been given what’s called a new lease on life, and I wasted it among feathers, foams and wooden frames.

Aaaannnddd, if you’ve missed it the first 17 times, by subscribing to Granta today you’ll receive this issue—a 324-page trip through the minds and words of 22 of today’s best Spanish-language novelists—totally free. A $16.99 value!