hide caption. Tom Wingo is an unemployed South Carolinian football coach whose internist wife is having an affair with a pompous cardiac man. Where are you taking us? It was always like that in a massacre, the effect like screams in a cavethey remained for a while until time put an end to them. The dead are never far away. On writing mostly female characters who aren't always good. There's comfort in the darkness for me. In short, Our Share of Night, Enriquezs first novel to be published in English, reveals how sometimes, only fiction can fully illuminate the monstrous, indescribable, and ultimately shattering aspects of our reality. ", On what inspired her to write about Argentina's dictatorship. Yet what Enriquez seems to suggest throughout the book is that such episodes are not mere tropes. Trans. The novel opens 14 years later as Desiree, fleeing a violent marriage in D.C., returns home with a different relative: her 8-year-old daughter, Jude. Jessica Cohen, Slipping In short order, the military installed a junta that suspended political parties and various government functions, aggressively pursued free-market policies, and disappeared thousands of people over the next seven years. Juan and Gaspar eventually arrive in Puerto Reyes, where Juan has been called to channel a force known as the Darkness, a supernatural entity that feeds on humansin Juans words, a savage god, a mad god. He and Gaspar are in town to participate in the annual Ceremonial, a ritual during which the most potent occult families in Argentina attempt to summon the Darkness and draw power from it to maintain their status. Mariana Enriquez's fiction has appeared in The New Yorker, McSweeney's and Granta. Enriquez tells NPR's Lulu Garcia-Navarro that she's always been drawn to the macabre. Don Bartlett & Don Shaw, Where the Wild Ladies Are Zhang Ling. The scene in which Stella adopts her White persona is a tour de force of doubling and confusion. LITERARY FICTION, by Susan (a shrink with a lot of time on her hands) says to Tom, "Will you stay in New York and tell me all you know?" I think women should also be allowed to be villains, also be allowed to be brutal and all these things that traditionally are the territory of men. This months column reflects on Mariana Enriquezs Things We Lost in the Fire. This is a haunted story, and Enriquez has given voice to the victims of the Dirty War, and the generations that were harmed by its legacy. Various translators, Disquiet Polly Barton, The Wind Traveler WebIn effect, Enriquezs short fiction is populated by women suppressed by patriarchal necropolitics: lesbian teenagers (The Inn), girls both sexual and cruel (The Intoxicated In End of Term, two unwell girls find common ground. Mariana Enrquezs Buenos Aires, meanwhile, is scarred by decades of austerity, squalor and inequality, deadly misogyny, and the disappearance of around Marisa Mercurio When they return changed, the citys populace is forced to contend with their missing in a stirring reflection of the thousands disappeared during Argentinas dictatorship. Sen Kinsella, Boat People The Dangers of Smoking in Bed: Stories by Mariana Enriquez, Translated by Megan McDowell Shortlisted for the 2021 Booker Prize, Mariana Enriquezs stories are a testament to the craft of short fiction. Pat Conroy Yet this novelpowered by urgent, image-drenched language rendered beautifully by the translator Megan McDowellconvincingly captures what it feels like when your life is suddenly interrupted by a series of events that are so unimaginable and devastating, they seem unreal. So there is a ghostly quality to everyday life. I don't want to write about women that are, let's say, good and angelic women, goddesses. The book's stories mix elements of Argentine history with the supernatural: In one, a little girl disappears into a haunted house and is never seen again; in another, a young boy is murdered in what could be a satanic ritual. M ariana Enrquez, 48, lives in Buenos Aires. She is the author of nine books, including two short story collections, The Dangers of Smoking in Bed and Things We Lost in the Fire, both translated from Spanish by Megan McDowell. Categories: Shelly Bryant, On Time and Water And lose my self here. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic. Maria Stepanova. Gauthier Chapelle. Leonardo Padura. Vera and I - no flesh over our bones. Brendan Freely, We Know You Remember: A Novel Trans. Trans. To learn more, check out our transcription guide or visit our transcribers forum. Most notable, Enriquez also shows how genre elementsincluding horror and the supernaturalcan expand the possibilities of literary fiction. Like, I really wanted to write ghost stories, horror stories. WebEnriquez spent her childhood in Argentina during the years of the infamous Dirty War, which ended when she was ten. Mariana Enriquez is a writer and journalist based in Buenos Aires. WebMariana Enrquez ( Buenos Aires, 1973) is an Argentine journalist, novelist, and short story writer. Finally, the title story chronicles a bit of mass hysteria in which women start self-immolating as a protest Chicos que vuelven. Spiderweb: 1/5 End of Term: 3/5 No Flesh Over Our Bones: 1/5 The Neighbors Courtyard: 3/5 Under the Black Water: 4/5 Green Red Orange: 1/5 Things We Lost in the Leonardo Valencia. WebMariana Enriquez (Buenos Aires, 1973) es una periodista y escritora argentina. Vera and I will be beautiful and light, nocturnal and earthly; beautiful, the crusts of earth enfolding us. When she asks to see Trans. What I could bring to the table was something a bit more modern. Its one thing to mistreat and scare a young man, but its a All Rights Reserved. Trans. WebEnriquez ghosts, it seems, belong both to the past and the future. The Intoxicated Years is a sly accounting of five years of increasingly severe drug use among a clique of friends. Vera and I are going to be beautiful and light, nocturnal and earthy; beautiful, the crusts of earth unfolding us. She is the author of nine books, including two short story collections, The Dangers of Smoking in Bed and Things We Lost Trans. WebEnd of Term: A painful -literally - story of a girl who practically mutilates herself, haunted by a man and the girl who tries to help her. Originally published in 2017, this new translation by Megan McDowell follows Enriquezs lauded collection The Things We Lost in the Fire (2016, Eng. Frank Wynne & Jessie Mendez Sayer, Defense Mechanism I'm 43; I'm a bit older than the children of the disappeared, but not all of them because some have my age, some are older etc. When a waitress at a diner asks Gaspar where his mother is, Juan feels the boys pain in his entire body. It is primitive and wordless, raw and vertiginous. Later, when Juan and Gaspar check into a hotel, we learn that Gaspar might be similarly giftedas theyre walking down a hallway, Gaspar senses an otherworldly presence and instead of avoiding it he was drawn to it and was going toward it. Juan manages to pull his son away, but he mourns the fact that Gaspar is burdened with an inherited condemnation.. The Argentine writer Mariana Enriquezs grand, eloquent, and startling new novel, Our Share of Night, begins during this crisis and unfolds across subsequent and preceding years. Thus Were Their Faces. Roy Jacobsen. And this is the way I found, mixing it with the history, mixing it with the social issues, mixing with the fears we have as a society. Lytton Smith, It Happened on the First of September (or Some Other Time) We soon learn that Juans wife, Rosario, recently died in a grisly bus crash. WebMariana Enriquez (Buenos Aires, 1973) es una periodista y escritora argentina. LITERARY FICTION | Genius is the ultimate source of music knowledge, created by scholars like you who share facts and insight about the songs and artists they love. Choi Jin-young. Desiree, the fidgety twin, and Stella, a smart, careful girl, make their break from stultifying rural Mallard, Louisiana, becoming 16-year-old runaways in 1954 New Orleans. Tending bar as a side job in Beverly Hills, she catches a glimpse of her mothers doppelgnger. 2017). There may be a barely-glimpsed smaller novel buried in all this succotash (Tom's marriage and life as a football coach), but it's sadly overwhelmed by the book's clumsy central narrative device (flashback ad infinitum) and Conroy's pretentious prose style: ""There are no verdicts to childhood, only consequences, and the bright freight of memory. Trans. WebKnown for. LITERARY FICTION | I mean, I'm interested in ghost stories, I'm interested in witches, I'm interested in the occult. We see Argentina attempt to reorient itself after years of chaos and glimpse the conditions that precipitated the turmoil. Andri Snr Magnason. Inseparable identical twin sisters ditch home together, and then one decides to vanish. Vanessa Springora. She is the author of Things We Lost in the Fire and The Dangers of Smoking in Bed, which was shortlisted for the 2021 International Booker Prize.Our Share of Night was awarded the prestigious Premio David Grossman. Trans. In an interview with the whole band, they were asked what this song really was all about was it meant to symbolize the end of the band? Pre-publication book reviews and features keeping readers and industry McDowell notes, Mariana Enriquezs particular genius catches us off guard by how quickly we can slip from the familiar into a new and unknown horror (Enriquez, 202). In line with this observation, McDowells translation is often almost mundane in tone, which increases the shock effect when it comes. Bennett is deeply engaged in the unknowability of other people and the scourge of colorism. Pedro Mairal. The god, of course, is power; indeed, this scene could be a metaphor for the tragedies throughout human history in which untold numbers of people were killed by demagogues and autocrats determined to eliminate any hint of opposition. Constantin Severin. Mariana Enriquez is an award-winning Argentine novelist and journalist, whose work has been translated into more than twenty languages. Krzysztof Siwczyk. Yet the wonder of this book is that she shows us, time and again, that the supposedly impersonal forces of terror that act on our lives arent as remote as they seem. Mundane cruelty and selfishness infiltrate much of Dangers, particularly among the teenagers; the apathy that runs through stories about homelessness, mental illness, and wealth disparity is reconstructed as teenage disputes in Our Lady of the Quarry and Back When We Talked to the Dead. In The Lookout, a ghost in the guise of a young girl lures a depressed woman toward destruction. Vanessa Prez-Rosario, Kazbek Trans. Nichola Smalley, More Than I Love My Life: A Novel Trans. There were a lot of echoes now, Enriquez writes. Trans. Trans. And the mix was there. Juan Peterson and his young son, Gaspar, are urgently fleeing from, or heading toward, something. What we detect, almost immediately, is that Juan is endowed with unusual abilities. A writer whose affinity for the horror genre is matched by the intensity of her social consciousness, Enriquez was kind enough to answer my questions about Argentine literary history, the occult nature of totalitarian regimes, the evil pleasures of Clive Barker, and much more. Ocampo, Silvina. Magdalena Mullek, Out of the Cage Victims of the regimesuspected dissidents or subversiveswere abducted, tortured, and murdered, and many were buried in unmarked, mass graves.