El corazón de Voltaire and El silencio de Galileo: Neo-Historical Approach in Two Detective, Epistolary, and Postmodern Hybrid Novels

Luis López Nieves’s novels and short stories are concerned with the demystification of History (with a capital “H”) and with the multiple versions of history. López Nieves mixes “la historia trocada” and the new epistolary technique because they are the ways he has found to transcend genre, age and time. Using multiple voices and narrators, his hybrid novels concern the action of a male and a female protagonist, target young and old readers, mix past, present and future all in the same story. In so doing, López Nieves has created an innovative writing style, a novel way of rethinking history and, above all, works of literature that transcend the local and become true examples of the global experience of human life. This article argues that Luis López Nieves’s style, as it emerged in his last two novels, can be defined as a new epistolary cybernetic postmodern genre mediated by the e-mail structure concerning a neo-historical topic. To support this thesis, the article analyzes López Nieves’s last two novels, El corazón de Voltaire (Voltaire’s Heart, 2005) and El silencio de Galileo (Galileo’s silence, 2009). In addition, it offers the results of an interview originally conducted with the author in Puerto Rico in 2011 and 2012 and integrated and updated through personal communications with the author in May 2016.