Spanish writer Marta Jiménez Serrano brings Oxygen to Chile, a novel based on her near-death experience from a carbon monoxide leak in 2020. Published by Alfaguara, the book examines housing precarity and human interdependence. "I wouldn't be alive if it weren't for others", the author states.
Marta Jiménez Serrano, 36, survived a carbon monoxide leak at home with her partner Juan on November 7, 2020. The incident, vividly described in Oxygen's opening lines, nearly cost them their lives. The novel recounts the experience in first person, through an analytical and detached narrator.
The writing process was slow and meticulous, Jiménez recounts. She took notes right after the event but took time to structure it. "It was progressive, not an epiphanic moment", she explains. Challenges included lacking intrigue in an autobiographical tale and narrating unremembered events.
Oxygen denounces housing precarity and high rental costs in Spain. The author reflects on home, concluding it lies in personal routines and habits rather than material structures. Critics like El País praise its crystalline prose and brevity, around 160 pages.
Jiménez emphasizes the interdependence shown by the accident: neighbors and emergency services saved her. "Both [therapy and literature] involve verbalizing an experience and having it validated by others", she says on their therapeutic value. Following her poetry collection La edad ligera and prior Sexto Piso novels, she arrives in Chile with Alfaguara's edition.
