MAGIC REALISM

The novelist H. G. Carrillo's inventions went too far.

- D. T. MAX

The novelist Hache Carrillo was admitted to a hospital in Washington, D.C., in April, 2020. He was fifty-nine years old, and had spent the previous several months receiving radiation treatment for prostate cancer. The first wave of the pandemic was cresting and a hospital was not a place anyone wanted to be. For two weeks, he and his husband, Dennis van Engelsdorp, held out at their home, in Berwyn Heights, a Maryland suburb. VanEngelsdorp recalls this as "a sacred time" of chatting intimately and holding hands. They suspected that Carrillo's medication was causing him to suffer seizures and dehydration, and after he collapsed in the shower the couple headed for the E.R.

Carrillo was an admired figure in the literary world. His reputation rested on his one novel, "Loosing My Espanish," about a Cuban-born high-school history teacher in Chicago. Published in 2004, the book had impressed critics with its bravura use of wobbly Spanish to evoke the experience of an exile whose native language has been supplanted by a new one, and with its complex interweaving of colonial history and cherished memories. The prose was lush, the tales improbable: the narrator's grandfather emerges from the sea, impregnates his grandmother, then returns underwater. The Miami Herald declared that the novel was "of interest to everyone who has inherited a history and a language they could not fully connect with but still tried to preserve." Latino writers were especially enthusiastic: the Dominican-born Junot Díaz praised Carrillo's "formidable" talent, calling his "lyricism pitch-perfect and his compassion limitless." Eduardo Galeano, the Uruguayan writer, said of Carrillo's sensual prose, "Did you know that language can be read and heard and seen and touched? That you can smell it, taste it?"