Mariana Enriquez

 

They Toss Bodies at You: On Mariana Enríquez’s “Our Share of Night”

By Elizabeth Gonzalez James

February 6, 2023

“TE TIRAN MUERTOS,” Mariana Enríquez writes in Our Share of Night, the hotly anticipated English translation of her 2019 Spanish-language novel. “In Argentina, they toss bodies at you.” This arresting line comes near the end of the almost 600-page novel, as a character grapples with having discovered that a loved one was kidnapped and tortured, their chest split open and a child’s severed arm sewn up inside. I begin my review with this image not to shock, but rather to prepare you for the world we are about to enter, not unlike the sign hung above Dante’s gates of Hell: “Abandon hope, all ye who enter here.”

Mariana Enriquez

Review

Our Share of Night by Mariana Enríquez review – political horror

Set in the decades during and after Argentina’s military dictatorship, this occult treatment of the ‘dirty war’ fuses political allegory and gleeful gore

Sam Byers
Thursday 27 October 2022

In 2017, Things We Lost in the Fire by Argentinian writer Mariana Enríquez introduced a compelling new voice to English readers. Tough-edged and tightly honed, her short stories inhabited the space between high gothic horror and cruel sociopolitical reality. At its best, her writing had a cool, brutal economy:

We moved. My brother still went crazy. He killed himself at twenty-two. I was the one who identified his ruined body … He didn’t leave a note. He told me his dreams were always about Adela. In his dreams, our friend didn’t have fingernails or teeth; she was bleeding from the mouth, her hands bled.

Mariana Enriquez / ‘Our Share of Night’ is a masterpiece of supernatural horror

Mariana Enriquez

 

‘Our Share of Night’ is a masterpiece of supernatural horror

Mariana Enriquez’s novel, her first published in English, uses otherworldly elements to consider Argentina’s violent history

Review by Hamilton Cain

February 5, 2023

As political partisanship boiled over in the aughts, showrunner Alan Ball rolled out HBO’s “True Blood,” adapting Charlaine Harris’s pulp series about a coven of vampires — and the humans who love them — for the small screen, tapping horror tropes to plumb deeper truths surrounding xenophobia and desire. Excessive gore, spiritual angst, sexy bodies: They were all there for the audience, no holds barred. Moody yet hilarious, the show won an Emmy and a Golden Globe.

I frequently thought of “True Blood” as I read Mariana Enriquez’s masterpiece of genre mash-up, “Our Share of Night,” the Argentine writer’s first novel published in English. Lauded for her short fiction, Enriquez here slathers on supernatural conceits: How better to respond to that country’s violent history than with a shadowy sect teeming with wraiths and demons, a haunted house, a dynastic family that would sacrifice its own to maintain power? Make no mistake, though: “Our Share of Night” is a literary achievement, gorgeous and exacting in its execution.

Our Share of Night by Mariana Enriquez / A Gorgeous, Dazzling Novel and a Mouthpiece for Human Darkness

A Gorgeous, Dazzling Novel and a Mouthpiece for Human Darkness

“Our Share of Night,” by Mariana Enriquez, is a bewitching brew of mystery, myth, wealthy occultists and mediums who can summon “the Darkness.”

OUR SHARE OF NIGHT, by Mariana Enriquez. Translated by Megan McDowell.

By Danielle Trussoni
Feb. 9, 2023

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In the 1970s, the artist Salvador Dalí was commissioned to create a tarot deck for the James Bond film “Live and Let Die.” The deal fell through, but Dalí continued to work on the cards, casting himself as the Magician and his wife, Gala, as the Empress. Inspired by the raw, dreamlike language of Delacroix, Duchamp and Surrealism, Dalí married the hallucinatory with the concrete, the esoteric with the commonplace and the disturbing with the beautiful to create images that feel both ethereal and visceral.

Marina Enríquez

 

Shock of the new: Jordan Peele, Mariana Enríquez and more on the horror fiction renaissance

As authors across the world explore their darkest fears, horror fiction is evolving to offer a chilling reflection of our times

Neil McRobert

Saturday 28 October 2023

There was a time, a few decades ago, when horror fiction meant just a few names. Stephen King and Dean Koontz in the US, James Herbert and Clive Barker in the UK. It was a boom time for sales but not critical recognition: a sea of paperbacks passed beneath school desks. And then, in the mid 90s, horror largely disappeared. Writers of darkness were repackaged into more market-friendly categories – thriller, dark fantasy, or that neutering, catch-all classification: suspense.

The Intoxicated Years by Mariana Enríquez

 

Mariana Enríquez

The Intoxicated Years 

by Mariana Enríquez

Translated by Megan McDowell

1989

That summer the electricity went out for six-hour stretches on the government’s orders; the country didn’t have any more energy, they said, though we didn’t really understand what that meant. Our parents couldn’t get over how the Minister of Public Works had announced the measures necessary to avoid a widespread blackout from a room lit only by a hurricane lamp: like in a slum, they repeated. What would a widespread blackout be like? Would we remain in the dark forever? That possibility was incredible. Stupid. Ridiculous. Useless adults, we thought, how useless. Our mothers cried in the kitchen because they didn’t have enough money or there was no electricity or they couldn’t pay the rent or inflation had eaten away at their salaries until they didn’t cover anything beyond bread and cheap meat, but we girls – their daughters – didn’t feel sorry for them. Our mothers seemed just as stupid and ridiculous as the power outages. Meanwhile, we had a van. It belonged to Andrea’s boyfriend. Andrea was the prettiest of all of us, the one who knew how to rip up jeans to make fabulous cutoffs, and wore crop tops that she bought with money she stole from her mother. The boyfriend’s name doesn’t matter. He had a van he used to deliver groceries during the week, but on weekends it was all ours. We smoked some poisonous pot from Paraguay that smelled like urine and pesticide but was cheap and effective. The three of us would smoke and then, once we were totally out of our minds, we’d get into the back of the van, which didn’t have windows or any light at all because it wasn’t designed for people, it was made to transport cans of garbanzos and peas. We would have him drive really fast, then slam on the brakes, or go around and around the traffic island at the city’s entrance. We had him speed up around corners and make us bounce over speed bumps. And he did it all because he was in love with Andrea and he hoped that one day she would love him back. We would shout and fall on top of each other; it was better than a roller coaster and better than alcohol. Sprawled in the darkness, we felt like every blow to the head could be our last and, sometimes, when Andrea’s boyfriend had to stop because he got held up at a red light, we sought each other out in the darkness to be sure we were all still alive. And we roared with laughter, sweaty, sometimes bloody, and the inside of the truck smelled of empty stomachs and onions, and sometimes of the apple shampoo we all shared. We shared a lot: clothes, the hair dryer, bikini wax. People said that we were similar, that the three of us looked alike, but that was just an illusion because we copied each other’s movements and ways of speaking. Andrea was beautiful, tall, with thin and separated legs; Paula was too blond and turned a horrible shade of red when she spent too long in the sun; I could never manage a flat belly or thighs that didn’t rub together – and chafe – when I walked.

Mariana Enriquez on the Fascination of Ghost Stories

Mariana Enríquez

Mariana Enríquez on the Fascination of Ghost Stories

By David S. Wallace

December 12, 2016

In “Spiderweb,” your story in this week’s issue, an already sour relationship is tested by a road trip north to Paraguay. For you, is there a particular significance to the characters’ journey into the north? Or is there a more general idea of the north that Argentines might have? The story notes that things take longer to disappear there.

 

Notes on Craft by Mariana Enríquez

Translated by Josie Mitchell

Mariana Enríquez is a novelist, journalist and short-story writer from Argentina. Things We Lost in the Fire, translated by Megan McDowell, is her first book to appear in English, published by Portobello Books in 2017. In this series, we give authors a space to discuss the way they write – from technique and style to inspirations that inform their craft.

 

Our Lady of the Quarry by Mariana Enriquez

(Translated, from the Spanish, by Megan McDowell.)

December 14, 2020

Silvia lived alone in a rented apartment of her own, with a five-foot-tall pot plant on the balcony and a giant bedroom with a mattress on the floor. She had her own office at the Ministry of Education, and a salary; she dyed her long hair jet black and wore Indian blouses with sleeves that were wide at the wrists and silver thread that shimmered in the sunlight. She had the provincial last name of Olavarría and a cousin who had disappeared mysteriously while travelling around Mexico. She was our “grownup” friend, the one who took care of us when we went out and let us use her place to smoke weed and meet up with boys. But we wanted her ruined, helpless, destroyed. Because Silvia always knew more: if one of us discovered Frida Kahlo, oh, Silvia had already visited Frida’s house with her cousin in Mexico, before he vanished. If we tried a new drug, she had already overdosed on the same substance. If we discovered a band we liked, she had already got over her fandom of the same group. We hated that her long, heavy, straight hair was colored with a dye we couldn’t find in any normal beauty salon. What brand was it? She probably would have told us, but we would never ask. We hated that she always had money, enough for another beer, another ten grams, another pizza. How was it possible? She claimed that in addition to her salary she had access to her father’s account; he was rich, she never saw him, and he hadn’t acknowledged paternity, but he did deposit money for her in the bank. It was a lie, surely. As much a lie as when she said that her sister was a model: we’d seen the girl when she came to visit Silvia and she wasn’t worth three shits, a runty little skank with a big ass and wild curls plastered with gel that couldn’t have looked any greasier. I’m talking low-class—that girl couldn’t dream of walking a runway.

Argentinian writer Samanta Schweblin in 2015.BERNARDO PÉREZ

Will the next Latin American literature boom be female?

A new generation of writers is being hailed in both the Spanish and English-speaking worlds

English version by Debora Almeida

Paula Corroto

August 17, 2017

Argentinean writer Samanta Schweblin, is having a great year. The Buenos Aires-based 40-year-old’s novel, Fever Dream, was a finalist for the Man Booker International prize, one of the most important English-language literature prizes.

In the end Schweblin did not win, but simply being nominated was a feat for a book originally written in Spanish by a Latin American. Fever Dream’s other accomplishments include a review in The New York Times, an accomplishment shared by fellow female Argentinean writers Mariana Enríquez, 44, and Pola Oloixarac, 40.

The three authors are not alone. In Spain, some of the best literary reviews in recent months have been of books by Latin American women. These include Qué Vergüenza (What a disgrace) by Chilean Paulina Flores, Bolivian Liliana Colanzi’s, Our Dead World, and Mexican Laia Jufresa’s, Umami.

Pola OloixaracHINDUSTAN TIMES

Bogotá 39, an event staged by the Hay Festival, brings together 39 of the best authors in Latin America under the age of 40. A significant number this year were women, including Ecuadorian Mónica Ojeda and Gabriela Jáuregui and Brenda Lozano from Mexico. Men still outnumbered women, 26 to 13, but there still hasn’t been a time like this for female Latin American authors, who are increasingly receiving international acclaim, which has prompted speculation that a new Latin American literary boom could be led by women this time around.

“It’s true that in recent times there’s been a kind of boom, the ‘other boom’ in a way,” says Flores. “I think it has to do with publishers who are giving more space to women. Anyway, I am of the opinion that there will have to come a time when a woman being a writer isn’t a novelty or a surprise. We shouldn’t focus on whether something was written by a man or a woman, but look at the literature itself.”

Women’s work is not published and translated on the scale men’s work is Laia Jufresa, Mexican author

But Claudio López Lamadrid of Penguin Random House believes boom is overstating things. He said his firm has been publishing Latin American women for years but people haven’t been paying attention and that it wasn’t until Schweblin’s Fever Dream that people started to notice.

Laia Jufresa believes “there is less prejudice” among publishers toward female writers, but also shares Lamadrid’s skepticism. “Just because there is a wave, it shouldn’t prevent us from seeing the fact that we still have a long way to go,” she says Jufresa, adding: “Women’s work is not published and translated on the of scale men’s work: this happens all over the world, but with Spanish, which can be read in many countries, it is more noticeable. The books of a Peruvian author, or Mexican, Uruguayan, etc., are usually read in their country and perhaps in Spain, but rarely in other Latin American countries.”

Iolanda Batallé, an editor at Spanish publishers Rata Editorial, insists there is a boom, even if the sales figures don’t match the figures that writers such as Mario Vargas Llosa or Gabriel García Márzquez notched up in the 1960s. She believes it isn’t just female writers from Latin America who are enjoying success and attention. “The reason is as simple as it is powerful: curiosity,” says Batallé. “Readers want to know more about themselves and for this, it is essential to also read female authors.” Batallé believes that the day will come when female authors will be writing the books with the greatest impact. “They have much more to say, for the simple reason that they have not gotten the chance to say it yet,” she argues.

Mariana EnríquezGETTY

Beyond the obvious similarities among these female writers, there’s another common factor: their work’s themes often touch on the dark side of life. For example, Mariana Enriquez’s Things We Lost in the Fire explores the impoverished neighborhoods “on the dark side of a proud Argentina.” In Our Dead World, Colanzi describes the meat industry. In Umami, Jufresa writes about mourning and absence. Just as Mexican Verónica Gerber writes about the end of an affair in Empty Set. Mónica Ojeda says her book Nefando (Nefarious) is about pedophilia. Argentinean Paula Porroni writes about failure and self-punishment in Buena Alumna (Good schoolgirl).

Their works often explore the dark side of life

Batallé believes that this unique interest is due to the fact that “Latin American women maintain a link with the more savage parts of existence, perhaps because of the societies in which they were born.” “Take a look at geography, the economy, or the history of Latin America” continues Batallé, “and everywhere you will find difficult realities. This pain, coupled with a strong literary tradition (above all masculine), plus the talent of so many writers, ends up creating good literature.”

For Schweblin, these themes are what literature is all about. “It is the most effective way we have to submerge ourselves into darkness, and into our worst fears and desires, in all that is unknown and unnameable. We return to reality with new information and as unscathed as possible,” she says.

EL PAÍS