“My head hurts funny.” That was what the writer Marta Jiménez Serrano remembers saying one morning in November 2020, just before entering the bathroom and collapsing to the floor. What happened next has been told to her by others: her partner, who found her unconscious, and the emergency workers, who detected levels of carbon monoxide in her blood greater than 46 percent. If he had inhaled a little more, from 50 percent, he would have gone into a coma. With concentrations above 60 percent, it would be dead.
In ‘Oxígeno’ (Alfaguara), Jiménez Serrano, who at that time had not yet published his first novel, ‘The proper names’ (2021), tells the story of that accident that almost ended his life. An accident that did not leave him with physical consequences but with psychological and emotional consequences: fear of sleeping, existential unease and a deep hatred for his landlady, a woman who lived in Los Angeles and who “did not want to have to take care of anything.” Among that “nothing” was the boiler inspection.
The author recounts her experience in the form of a non-fiction novel. ‘Oxygen’ is not only a chronicle of the accident or a reckoning loaded with cathartic and therapeutic rage, but rather an intimate and literary exploration of that experience. A very rich book, of a hybrid nature and fragmentary structure, but not at all baroque, written with apparently simple, very clean and fluid prose.
It mixes topics as diverse as death, relationships, the housing problem, literature, trauma, individualism or childhood, narrated in the first person and articulated through a wide variety of narrative resources: press news, medical data, legislative information, memories, interviews, reflections…
Beyond the story of the accident, ‘Oxígeno’ becomes an investigation into contemporary vulnerability and the fragility of the bonds that sustain daily life. A book that shows that you can continue writing literature of the self without falling into the self, self, self-indulgent and narcissistic self; that the intimate, when exposed with creativity and honesty, can acquire collective resonance and relevance.
