Book Club: Gifted writer continuing to develop exploration of strangeness of life

His first novel to appear in English, Signs Preceding the End of the World, was published to great critical acclaim in 2015 and included in many Best-of-Year lists, including The Guardian‘s Best Fiction and NBC News’s Ten Great Latino Books, going on to win the 2016 Best Translated Book Award and be selected as one of The Guardian’s ‘100 Best Books of the 21st Century’.

Translated by Lisa Dillman, Ten Planets is composed of twenty short stories about imagined near and distant futures that reveal the strangeness and instability of the present. With these stories, this gifted writer continues to develop his exploration of the strangeness of life with a deep love of storytelling in all its forms. In ‘The Obituarist' excerpted here exclusively in the Sheffield Telegraph, there is a distinctly noir-ish detective in a future that bears some strong resemblances to contemporary life.

Publishing on the 7th of February 2023, you can order Ten Planets from your local library or from your local Sheffield bookshops, including the independents Rhyme and Reason, La Biblioteka and Juno Books.

The Start of Herrera's story 'The Obituarist'

On the way to the scene of death, the obituarist groused about fucking invisibility: Fucking invisibility; as if I didn’t know that this empty street, just like every empty street in every other city, is teeming with people.

The only ones who could be seen were the ones whose jobs required public visibility: delivery people, plumbers, painters, etcetera. They got badges, and when they put them on, became what they had to be and only what they had to be: delivery person, plumber, painter, etcetera, each covered by a neon silhouette. The rest wandered about unseen, protected by a buffer that blocked images, sounds, odors, keeping their bodies at a distance. Which meant that, walking down a deserted street, you’d bump into soft lumps that knocked you gently from side to side. Only in the heaviest congestion could people’s contours be seen and thus avoided, but there was never any need to see faces or expressions, feel bones or fat. Ever. The buffer served as a laissez-passer, allowing travel, and owners could take them off only indoors.

Yeah, big deal, the obituarist muttered, as he did each day: he could still sense them at that very moment. Their irritated presence, their contained rage. He might be able to stop seeing others but he couldn’t stop sensing their essence. Sooner or later even children learn that hiding your eyes doesn’t actually make things disappear. I can sense them right now, he repeated, making his way through the subdued reproach of those standing aside to let him pass.

He reached the building, saw the elevator doors open, and tried to get on but bounced gently off the people inside. He walked up three flights. There were already two badges at the scene of death. Certifiers. They certified the dead’s death, and he recounted the living’s life. Though the government possessed every piece of electronic communication anyone had ever sent in their life, the obituarist didn’t use them to tell their story, basing it instead on what the living had left behind. His obituaries were wildly successful. The public devoured them, not only to learn what a person had done without having had to put up with them while they were alive, but because many had high hopes that accumulating certain things would enable them to manipulate obituarists into telling better stories about them.

“Lotta people out today?” asked one of the badges, neon pulsating with each word.

“Same as ever,” replied the obituarist. “But the most important person in the room ain’t complaining.”

The obituarist didn’t like people criticizing his work. He prided himself on being punctual. Though it might seem his profession was the one least requiring haste, he knew how important it was to get to a story before its parts began to dissolve.

The certifier who’d spoken pulsed softly in silence. The other said:

“Nothing new. Guy had a functioning heart one second and a nonfunctioning heart a second later.”

The second certifier was, most likely, a woman.

He observed the body. It looked tired, even in death. The kind of tiredness that was no longer common: hands wrinkled, skin weathered, a rictus of severe resignation. While he studied the body, the certifiers put away their instruments and were already on their way out when the obituarist said:

“Don’t go.”

He thought he felt something.

“Is there someone else I need to see?” he asked.

The certifiers pulsed doubtfully, containing more than emitting their neon. They didn’t understand what he meant.

“Is it just the two of you?” he went on. “No one else came with you?”

“Two, as it should be,” said the one who’d spoken first.

“Wait for me at the door.”

The certifiers obeyed, no clear emotion discernible from their silhouettes.

He began searching through what the dead man had left behind. Kitchen utensils. Few. Generic. Indicating no interest in complicated dishes. Furniture. An armchair, a table, a chair, a bed, a dresser. Generic. Made to meet basic needs. And clothes. Lots of clothes. Odd. People didn’t tend to accumulate clothes now that buffers were mandatory; the obituarist had even found people who no longer bothered to get dressed. And this dead guy had a lot of clothes. But . . . generic. Identical. The obituarist looked at them for a bitlooked at the clothes, then looked at the body. Looked at the clothes, then looked at the body. Kept searching. On the dresser he found documents from the dead man’s job, including pictures of the sort of metal balls that had become popular. The obituarist had come upon them in many homes, but not in this one, that of a man who had sold them. He felt curious about this man who’d left him almost nothing to work with: this was a list, not a life. Whatever he’d been inside could hardly be divined by his belongings.