Meet Thirroul’s Dr Alfredo Herrero de Haro, Spanish lecturer and debut author
Please tell us a bit about yourself.
I’m Spanish, but I spent 10 years in England and I moved to Australia in 2013. I lecture Spanish at Wollongong Uni but my research focuses on phonetics and language variation.
What brought you to Thirroul?
I was living in Birmingham, England, and I got offered a job at the University of Wollongong, so my wife and I moved here. Initially, we only planned to stay here for a couple of years but, almost 10 years later, we’re still here and now we have two kids.
Congratulations on your first book – what's A Dead Man’s Ice Cream about?
Thank you. On the surface, it’s about a young man on the autism spectrum who has no family and depends on friends to navigate life; there is also a murder investigation in the background. However, the novel is much more complex. There is a key concept in education called differentiation, which means making every exercise and lesson accessible to all students regardless of their level; students get and produce something different out of the same exercise. I designed my novel following this principle. There is a superficial layer about a young man on the autistic spectrum and a series of murders. Then, there is a middle layer which explores different themes, such as social class. Finally, there is a deep layer of symbolism with references to literary classics and to James Joyce’s work. It took me 11 years to write the novel and I designed it to cater for readers who were looking for an entertaining story, while also challenging those readers who are willing to delve deeper into the Joycean dimension of the novel.
Intriguing title – what's the story behind the name?
A friend of mine’s a doctor and once he told me he’d eaten a dead man’s ice cream. He saw an ice cream in the freezer at work and his colleague told him that it belonged to a gentleman who had died recently, but the staff didn’t think it was appropriate to give it to the gentleman’s family together with his other possessions. My friend’s colleague said that the fridge-freezer was due to be cleaned in the morning and that they’d get rid of everything in it, so my friend asked if he could eat the ice cream. The novel develops this story further to prompt the main character’s awakening to avoid letting his life melt and go to waste, like a dead man’s ice cream. As a result, a dead man’s ice cream becomes a recurrent symbol of wasted opportunities and it symbolises the desire to do something meaningful in life.
It's a century since Ulysses was published in 1922 – how did James Joyce's masterpiece come to influence your debut novel?
Ulysses inspired me to write this novel. I modelled my novel after Ulysses, with 18 chapters, each written in a different literary style, and with different colours, organs, symbols, and scientific disciplines assigned to each chapter. I wanted to write a Ulysses set in Birmingham as a tribute to the city where I spent seven amazing years.
Congratulations too on launching your own small press. What inspired this and what's next?
Thank you. My inspiration came from seeing authors struggle to get good-quality work published because publishers didn’t see it as commercially viable. This year I’m publishing a collection of poems by a UK-based linguist and a local history book by a retired lawyer. My aim is to publish up to three books per year, as that is all I would be able to fit around all my other commitments.
Where to buy the book
Locally, the novel can be purchased from the following shops: Collins Bookstore, Thirroul; Stanwell Palms General Café, Stanwell Park; Better Read Than Dead, Newtown; Unishop, University of Wollongong campus.
