our share of the night (mariana enriquez, tr. megan mcdowell)

I tend to steer clear of writing here about anything with which I have a personal connection. I wouldn’t say Mariana Enriquez and I are great mates, but we did sit and have a coffee together a few weeks back and there’s the small issue of spending years adapting a short story of hers for the screen, which might become a thing one day, and might not. I actually began reading Our Share of the Night whilst waiting outside the Solis to go to a talk of hers. All of which means to say that I am steeped in mundo Enriquez, one way or another, and cannot claim my normal objectivity, if such a thing exists. I also seem to remember her saying that the novel was not that well received when it was published in the UK. It has taken me over a month to get through it. It’s a weighty text with grand ambitions, which sometimes feels as though it’s going around the houses, of Buenos Aires, La Plata or London. However, going round the houses is also one of its strengths. This is a book that deals with the occult, that deals with spaces or houses that can only be accessed with occult knowledge, and the terrifying things that happen therein. There are moments when Enriquez makes clear her literary and poetic antecedents: she is writing in a tradition of investigation of the world which might exist on the other side of our consciousness. One where the immortals wield a scabrous power, one that the rich and powerful would happily kill to access. 

things we lost in the fire (mariana enriquez, tr megan mcdowell)

Enriquez is something of a phenomenon in the Southern Cone. Many people whose opinions I value rate her highly and one can see why, from this early collection of short stories. The writing blends horror with social realism. In so doing it hones in on two complementary but not identical themes. The legacy of the dictatorship in Argentina; and the issue of specifically urban poverty, so often connected to drug abuse and the narcos moving in on inner cities, turning them into a dangerous no-man’s land. In many of the stories, the remate, or punchline, is constructed around the disappeared. Either those who are known as Los Desaparecidos, the political prisoners who were vanished by the military dictatorship, or, more prosaically, simply people who disappear, sometimes conveniently, as in the case of the annoying husband in the story Spiderweb. As the introduction outlines, Enriquez was born at the tail-end of the Argentine junta’s rule, and the echoes of their crimes filter down the years and make themselves heard in her tales. At the same time, the focus on what might be called social concerns, has a more immediate, topical feel. Buenos Aires is city where poverty is never far away. There are barrios, such as the one the DA visits in the story Under the Black Water which are no-go areas. But as well as that, there are the walking dead, the pasta base addicts, who patrol the streets, one of whom is brilliantly brought to life in the opening story of this collection, The Dirty Kid. This intersection between the zombified underclass and the struggling lower middle class, and then the middle class itself, is a febrile pressure point in Latin American society, and Enriquez puts her finger on it and squeezes, to devastating effect. The final story Things We Lost in the Fire, has a Saramago feel as it translates her themes into a more explicit feminist context. Enriquez’ willingness to use the coarse tools of horror in order to explore social and historical psychoses is highly effective. She uses the horror as a can opener, a way of exposing her society’s guts, in a way that a more measured take might not.