 Enrique
de Hériz
Reading guide 
by Isabel García Adánez
Enrique de Hériz (Barcelona, 1964) is without doubt
one of the most popular Spanish authors and one who has been
the most highly praised by the critics and public alike over
the last few years - praise which has culminated in Hériz
being awarded the Premio de los Libreros de Cataluña
- Premio Llibreter (Booksellers Prize of Catalonia)
in 2004 for his novel Mentira, with which he consolidates
a literary career that began ten years ago and was very promising
right from the start. It is ‘serious literature, with
a capital L', as they say.
Hériz has also broadened his role as editor, and currently
combines writing with translation - the aim being to fulfil
his dream of writing without being pressurised to achieve
success and without feeling the need to find easy solutions
in order to publish a series of novels, which perhaps detracts
from the themes he is planning in terms quality and depth.
This absence of haste and concessions makes so much more sense,
seeing that each novel is characterised not only by careful
and reflective elaboration, but also by a long period of research
and preparation.
Mentira [Lies] (Edhasa,
2004), which is inspired by a true story - that of a woman
who is declared officially dead from an accident and later
has to fight to prove that this assumption was false, reclaiming
her existence before the world and almost for herself - goes
way beyond this plot, in itself fascinating. In the novel
these events are intertwined with the results of an in-depth
study of the most recent fundamental works in the fields of
anthropology, ethnology and neurology, relating to the processes
of understanding and registering reality in the human brain.
In addition there are personal reflections on great universal
truths in literature, such as love, life, death, the construction
of identity, the vision of the ‘other', the vision of
oneself as ‘other', human relationships in all their
complexity, memory, the existence of a Truth, the eternal
confrontation between the truths of reason and those of the
human heart, and of the act of creation in itself.
Mentira is a novel written for two voices: on the
one hand, an older woman - a famous anthropologist from Barcelona
who is given up for dead after an accident during one of her
research trips in the Amazonian jungle and who from the outset,
fully conscious of this fact and the consequences, is reluctant
to show any signs of life and takes advantage of the situation
to rethink her existence and perhaps embark on another. On
the other hand, we have the perspective of her daughter, who
is still living in Barcelona and trying to reorganise the
daily life and personal world of members of the family in
her mother's absence. She is guided by her own private obsession
for gathering objective facts as they come to light, verifying
everything scientifically, never leaving any loose ends and
for finding a logical, objective explanation for the vicissitudes
of life – something that is impossible because of the
very nature of things and of human perception. Moreover, family
history, supposed truths with which they have always lived,
resonates in the memories of both women. They are often the
same stories from different viewpoints or based on different
facts, but neither woman knows the full truth, so they always
have to resort to invention, or for want of knowledge of the
truth, to some kind of ‘lie' that fills in the gaps
and lets them move on.
Mentira has been or is in the process of being translated
into ten languages (including English, French,
German, Italian, Greek and Norwegian) by reputable European
publishers, and international success will not be far behind
that which is already enjoyed in Spain.
His new novel Manual de la oscuridad
[Handbook of Darkness], which is expected to be finished
in 2007, tells the story of a magician who loses his sight
and is forced to rethink his life and his relationship with
the world around him. In order to find out for himself the
sensations, limitations and ways of perceiving the world of
his character, Hériz has spent many months working
with a tutor from the Organización Nacional de Ciegos
de España (Spanish National Blind Foundation). He had
also acquired certain knowledge of magic in the past. Very
little information about the novel is available yet, but it
sounds so thought-provoking that its publication is anxiously
awaited.
His previous works are not always available in bookshops,
which means it is not so easy to follow the evolution of a
career that foretold, more clearly with each work, the success
that Mentira would achieve and the position Enrique de Hériz
currently enjoys in the panorama of contemporary Spanish literature.
His first novel, El día menos pensado [The
Least-Expected Day] (1994), was reprinted by Edhasa in
2005 with an introduction by the author in which he acknowledges
that at that point, over ten years later, he would write the
story differently if he wrote it at all. Setting aside the
novel's inherent value and quality, at this distance it is
very interesting to be able to follow the trail of many ideas
that would culminate in Mentira, and that in some
way are constants in his work – sudden loss, the need
to reconstruct a new life after a disappearance, memory -
with all their limitations and deceptive nature, the perception
of things, the eternal question about the meaning of life,
the power of words, and so on.
Edhasa will also soon reprint Hériz's second work,
Historia del desorden [History of Chaos]
(2000), so those who were unable to read it when it was first
published will now be able to read about the adventures of
five peculiar characters in their intent to break with the
order of a global society and live in accordance with their
own particular subjectivity as the only acceptable ‘order'.
It is to be hoped that at some point Sorda, pero ruidosa
[Deaf, but Loud] – for which Hériz received
the prize for the best short story from the Universidad Nacional
de Educación a Distancia (National University of Distance
Learning) in 2003 - will also be reprinted.
In recent interviews, Enrique de Hériz announced that
the second part of Mentira would be called Últimas
noticias del territorio de Malespina [The Latest
News from the Territory of Malespina]. Although this
novel will not be available in the foreseeable future, it
will certainly be worth the wait.
June 2007
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