Luis López Nieves made history, even though he doesn’t believe there is such a thing. The Puerto Rican author broke ground with his novel, El Corazón de Voltaire (Voltaire’s Heart, 2005, Grupo Editorial Norma), an epistolary novel for the 21st century written entirely in e-mail.

For this academic, short story writer, and pioneer in using the Internet as a resource for writers (his site, www.ciudadseva.com, is an excellent resource), history is malleable and alternative, not boring or fossilized.

“Historians have been fooling us for centuries, telling us that they’ve been writing history. But I don’t believe that history exists,” says López Nieves, accompanied by his wife Mara Daisy Cruz (head of a new literary magazine scheduled for release in a few months), during a visit at the Miami Book Fair International.  

“I believe that every country invents it’s history, and that’s literature,” continues the 56-year-old novelist. “Joan of Arc, El Cid, King Arthur, George Washington – who never told a lie even though he was a politician. Every country invents its own epic and in order to proud of their own history, they adorn it and embellish it. And not only do they do it, they even have a right to do it, since that’s what I did with my first book, Seva, to give the country with a positive epic.”

López Nieves’ vision of how things might have been and not how they were, this retouched history, that serves as a common thread through his work, lead him to Voltaire’s Heart where he examines the story of one the major world thinkers, considered the father of the French Revolution, from another perspective.

 “I’ve always liked the epistolary genre,” says the author who, as he says, was “accidentally” born in Washington, DC, who has used varying degrees of this format in his three previous books Seva (1984), Escribir para Rafa (Writing for Rafa, 1987), and La Verdadera Muerte de Juan Ponce de Leon (2000, a genealogy fanatic, López Nieves traced his ancestry to the legendary conquistador).

 “I started to write the novel as an e-mail, but I didn’t plan for the whole thing to be that way. At some point, I’ll switch to a normal narration, I told myself, until I made a discovery,” he says. “That discovery was the rhythm. I discovered that, writing e-mails, that suddenly space and time weren’t so important. This gives the novel a vertiginous rhythm.” 

The format worked so well, says the creator and director of the only creative writing program in Latin America (at the University of the Sacred Heart) that he is thinking of using it again.

But then, wouldn’t he be like magician repeating the same trick?

 “I would like to write another novel with Roland de Luziers (the French genetics professor who is the hero of Voltaire’s Heart). I have a few ideas and I think another case is going to come up where they’ll contact him,” López Nieves reveals. “At least in one more novel. If the first epistolary novel didn’t exhaust the genre, well, look, mine is an epistolary novel too. The only changes is that it’s e-mail. I can repeat myself if what I’m relating is the same formula, if it’s exactly the same. But if Roland comes upon another, very different case, and the only thing the two stories have in common is that they’re told by e-mail, then I don’t see any problem.”