Lessons from the ‘dead’

THE Tang Dynasty poet Li Po, who plays a critical but unsettlingly ambiguous role in Enrique de Heriz’s adroitly provocative novel, “Lies,” once wrote:

A man should stir himself with poetry,

Stand firm in ritual,

And complete himself with art and music.

The rituals that Li Po had in mind were the Confucian and Taoist ceremonies and habits of mind that situated a person in a family and tradition that revered its ancestors -- not simply as those who had come before but as intercessors and guides to right conduct in the present.

Spanish prizewinner

“Lies” was a bestseller in the 43-year-old author’s native Spain and also a recipient of that country’s prestigious Premi Llibreter literary prize. John Cullen’s fine translation makes it easy to see why; “Lies” is that rare thing -- a fully realized novel of both ideas and emotions whose ambitions are pushed along by vivid characterizations and a plot whose pace, while measured, nevertheless unfolds as a sort of intellectual thriller.

There are a variety of satisfying pleasures to be had from this book, but one of the major ones is the author’s sympathetic and believable delineation of his two protagonists, both of whom are women.

One, Isabel Azuera, is an anthropologist who specializes in studying rituals associated with funerals and the dead. While doing field research deep in the wilds of northern Guatemala, she is mistakenly reported dead in a violent boating accident and the mutilated corpse of another victim is misidentified as her own. Isabel has gone to Central America not only for research but also to escape her family and its history, which she has come to experience as an increasingly burdensome web of fictions. She decides to allow herself to remain “dead” and takes refuge in a remote hut, where she uses her diary to ruminate on her work, her life and, particularly, on the fictions that have been handed on to her children as life lessons and her family’s history. (The readers’ experience of Isabel’s unfolding recollections and reflections is too central to this novel’s pleasures to give too much of it away. But suffice to say that in an author’s note regarding sources, Heriz acknowledges his -- and Isabel’s -- considerable debt to Beth Conklin’s classic “Consuming Grief: Compassionate Cannibalism in an Amazonian Society.” It’s an account of the Wari people, who literally eat their dead.)

There is, however, nothing abstract about Isabel’s reflections on her own history. Here, she records in the diary a memory of her husband:

“I lost my virginity that night. Actually, as far as ‘losing’ is concerned, I didn’t lose a thing. I won a man I’ve gone on loving my whole life and whose love I still believe in, despite his peculiarities. That’s a lot. But I also gained a fear I’ve never completely lost: the fear that everything was a lie. Julio and I fell in love like two children, which was almost logical: I was indeed quite young; he was 11 years older than I was, but he was still a teenager at heart.... I know that time multiplies the effects of nostalgia, and I don’t want to get carried away and magnify something that, after all, happens to everyone at least once in a lifetime. I fell in love, period.”

Meanwhile, Isabel’s meteorologist daughter, Serena, struggles to cope with her grief over her mother’s death by filling her own notebooks with memories of her family, of lessons her father passed on to his children along with her own careful reconstruction of what was true and false in the family history she received. Serena recently has discovered that she is pregnant, and that lends to the excavation of her problematic familial archeology both urgency and poignancy. She’s a smart, humane and troubled daughter.

Exile or imprisonment

Her father, Julio, has inculcated in his children an abhorrence of lies, repeating over and over the stories of the 8th century Chinese poet Li Po -- who, according to Julio, was sent into bitter exile for lying to the emperor -- and of their grandfather Simon, who heroically survived a terrible shipwreck and was imprisoned for deceiving his own father. Throughout their childhood, Julio would offer Serena and her siblings caught in misconduct a choice: exile, like Li Po, or imprisonment, like Simon. It all came to the same thing, Serena recalls, being sent to their rooms, but the distinction looms large.

So, too, does her unfolding realization that neither her father’s account of Li Po’s life -- he even seems to have made up proverbs and attributed them to the poet -- nor his stories of their grandfather are quite what they seem to be. And yet, as Serena recalls for another family member:

“What was magical about the story was much more than the words. It was Papa’s voice. He’d start talking and all at once you felt you were in a palace in China, with silks and jewels and jade flutes everywhere. When he said, ‘A bellow so powerful it made the palace’s foundations shiver,’ he made me want to hide under a table.

“I know what you mean. I remember being almost scared sometimes. And when he recited Li Po’s poems ...

” ... which weren’t by Li Po.

“No. Even the poems were fake?

“Well, he always put four poems in the story. Two were by Li Po, the other two weren’t. I imagine Papa made them up himself....”

Throughout the narrative, Isabel’s and Serena’s investigations and recollections collide and glance off one another until, in the end, the mother returns to Barcelona and reveals herself to her stunned children.

Heriz has had a long and distinguished career as an editor and translator from English. His projects have included Spanish-language renderings of popular novelists like Stephen King and Christopher Paolini, as well as John Fowles, Annie Proulx and Nadine Gordimer. “Lies” is an engaging and sophisticated work of fiction that reflects both currents of influence.

Heriz was also trained as a philologist and -- even in translation -- his shrewd appreciation of language and its allusive possibilities shines through. We have, for example, about 1,100 surviving works of Li Po, many of which frankly celebrate his love of wine and drunkenness. At least four of his poems were titled “Drinking Alone With the Moon,” and the most famous of those begins:

From a pot of wine among the flowers

I drank alone. There was no one with me --

Till raising my cup, I ask the bright moon

To bring me my shadow and make us three.

If one recalls that tradition has it that Li Po drowned while crossing the Yangtze River, something of Heriz’s purpose becomes clearer. Drunk and euphoric, the poet fell into the water while trying to embrace the moon’s reflection.

The choices that Isabel and Serena ultimately make in this fine novel are not all that different.

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timothy.rutten@latimes.com