The Corpse Reader

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Last, but by no means least:

After years of intense work, dozens of discarded drafts, exhausting days in which the word rest lost all meaning—when, finally, you come to the last page and look on the complete manuscript—you breathe for a moment before being gripped by a painful uncertainty. You feel satisfied because you’ve given your best, but inside you something says maybe it wasn’t enough. You’d like to have studied more, revised more, made your text more vibrant and surprising. For a moment you think perhaps all this effort won’t add up to an enthusiastic readership. And in that moment you remember everyone who helped you along the way. You remember your parents’ phone calls, urgent and caring, asking, “Son, how are you? And the novel…?” You remember your brothers, the best people in the world. You remember your daughter.

You remember friends old and new. Those who have always been with you and those you’ve recently met. Friends like Santiago Morata, Fernando Marías, Antonio Penadés, Alejandro Noguera, Lucía Bartolomé, Manuel Valente, Anika Lillo, and Carlos Aimeur. Friends whose help, closeness, and care you appreciate. You remember the editors, within your country and internationally, who had confidence and bet on you. You remember Ramón Conesa, your agent at Carmen Balcells, always ready with sage advice.

They all share a space in my memory next to my readers—those who have written to me to applaud or criticize, those whose spirits I managed to lift for a few days, and even those who haven’t yet read my work, because they push me to keep going day after day. I fight for them; they make writing worth it.

A special mention for Lixiao Zhuang, cultural adviser at the Chinese Embassy in Spain, for her selfless work putting me in touch with the directors of the Chinese National Museum in Beijing, the Huqing Yutang Museum of Chinese Medicine in Hangzhou, and General Fei Yue’s Mausoleum. And I couldn’t forget Dr. Phil A. R. Hill, a bookseller in White City, London, who advised me on a wide range of books and bibliographies. I must also mention doctor of forensics Devaraj Mandal and the eminent sinologist Jacques Gernet, without whose wisdom I would have been unable to make this book as credible as it needed to be.

It is not enough to simply mention my wife, Maite. Thanks be to God, I enjoy her presence each and every day. My lighthouse when times are good and bad. She is my life’s greatest gift.

I want to dedicate my final words to someone missed by all who knew him. A quiet person, but someone from whom I learned a great deal. His behavior, humility, and honesty all taught me things that books can’t teach.

For him and in his memory.

Thank you, Eugenio.