Spanish Inquisition

Enrique Serna is not a name familiar to the bibliophiles of the Capital,even to its aficionados of Spanish language. The 50-year-old novelist,one of Mexico’s most well-known,owes his relative anonymity in Delhi to the fact that only one of his books has been translated into English — Fear of Animals that came out last year. In the crime thriller,he suggests the Mexican literary establishment is no less corrupt than the country’s police force,and the book earned the wrath of writers,and the Mexican Embassy in London refused to promote it. “That was the reaction I wanted. I wanted to provoke a big scandal,” laughs Serna roguishly,sitting at Lodi,the Garden Restaurant.

He describes himself as a satirist and realist who tends to “portray the grotesque side of life”. His characters are mired in a political swamp,lead a combustive bisexual life,are bound up in class taboos of Mexican society and go from splendour to ruin,sometimes chasing an ideal image that can never be achieved. Reality in this writer’s world tends to be abrasive,suffused by the acidic black humour which critics initially dismissed as “incomprehensible to Mexican readers”.

Earlier,Serna has worked as a soap-opera writer and even biographed the life of singer-actor Jorge Negrete,the most mercenary of his books,to earn money when his daughter was born. These days,Serna,who moved to Barcelona,his “second motherland”,in 2007,is planning to return home — to Cuernavaca. “My wife is a famous actress in Mexico and could not go out in the streets without being attacked by fans. In Barcelona she could walk anywhere,” smiles Serna. Now perhaps you can check his Fear of Animals.