Writers Who Inspire Us: Between Realism and the Fantastic in the Work of Mariana Enríquez
Readers get horrified when they read one of my stories, with a child that lives in the streets, for example, but the truth is that they see children like that everyday. Many of them, sleeping in doorways, hungry, filthy. But when they read it, they ask how can I go so far. The truth is, I don’t go far at all. That child in the story seems like an exception, but he’s not. So yes it’s normalized on a surface level, but not really. When fiction does the trick of moving people, it’s like they can look at it again. I normalize it too of course: you can’t empathize all the time; you’d go crazy. So I guess I write to de-normalize it for me too.
—Mariana Enríquez, extract from an interview on LitHub
It was last year that I first came across the extraordinary and powerful work of Mariana Enríquez. My partner, a writer and avid reader, always comes home with books, so it wasn’t unusual to see him excited about a new title, but I remember distinctly that afternoon in April when he came to me in the garden, dropped Things We Lost in the Fire on the table and said, ‘You have to read this as soon as possible.’ That same evening, I started the book and became immediately drawn to Enríquez’s urban realist, eerie, and violent tales. After finishing the collection and reading interviews with her, I came to the conclusion that she, like many writers I admire, was strongly influenced by her background and culture. What she writes is a fictionalised version of the shocking and terrible world she’s learned about or observed around her. It’s not surprising that Enríquez has an affinity for stories set in traumatised spaces, spaces haunted by a dark and brutal past, where horrible things have happened and continue to happen, sometimes because of people’s actions, and at other times due to supernatural influences.
Mariana Enríquez was born in 1973 in Buenos Aires, Argentina, during a period of extreme political and economic instability. A military dictatorship was in full power and didn’t end until 1983, when Raúl Alfonsín, lawyer and statesmen, was democratically elected as the president of the country. The new regime and the path towards democracy, however, came with its own struggles and anxieties for the Argentine populace, especially the working class, and Enríquez invites her readers to learn about and understand the experiences of these people.
Mariana Enríquez isn’t just a writer of short fiction and novels, but also an editor, journalist, and nonfiction writer. She published her first book, Bajar es lo peor (Coming Down is the Worst) in 1995, but received international recognition after Things We Lost in the Fire, originally published in 2016 in Spanish, was translated in English by Megan McDowell and printed by Granta. This collection contains twelve tales that revolve around the atrocious side of Buenos Aires, from poverty, sex trafficking, young women and children who suffer sexual and emotional abuse, religious fanatism, and police brutality, to creatures with evil intentions, demons, ghosts, and saints willing to punish more than to forgive.
Understandably, such stories can be difficult to read and write, but Mariana Enríquez is interested in real events that have shaped her culture and have left a mark on the Argentine population. Admittedly, Enríquez’s work has a Gothic and horrific quality to it, although she explains in an interview for Latin American Literature Today that the Spanish tradition of horror literature as we know it in Western countries is almost nonexistent, and she continues to say that ‘when I make horror, I try to make it Latin American. To reimagine the subjects in accordance with our realities, to include indigenous mythologies, local urban legends, pagan saints, local murderers, the violences we live with, the social problems we suffer. [...] I talk about institutional violence, popular beliefs, poverty, economic uncertainty. I try to reimagine common tropes, from cosmic horror to the ghost story, with content belonging to my own history and my own culture.’
Her second collection of short stories, The Dangers of Smoking in Bed (originally published in Spanish in 2009), was translated in English this year, and has been critically lauded for how Enríquez combines the macabre with her social consciousness. This collection is thematically similar to Things We Lost in the Fire, but it places more of an emphasis on male abuse towards women, sexual repression, self-harm, witches, urban legends, and curses. The way Kirsty Logan, author of The Gracekeepers, describes this collection feels most accurate to me: ‘Rotting little ghosts, heartbeat fetishes, curses and witches and meat. Each of these stories is a luscious, bewitching nightmare.”
Enríquez is masterful in presenting not just the anguish of her characters, but also the kind of pain that lingers in certain environments due to their awful past. If I were to elaborate on her stories, I’d fear I wouldn’t do them the justice they deserve, or that I might spoil your experience as a future reader. But to me, as a writer who’s interested in exploring the unpleasant and the macabre from my own background, Enríquez’s stories inspire me on a profound level and resonate with my own experiences coming from a country that has a totalitarian regime in its recent past. Although I’m rarely disturbed by what I read no matter how intrinsically chilling, some of Enríquez's tales moved me physically and emotionally in such a way that I had to take long breaks before continuing to the next one. A natural reaction I’m willing to deal with for the sake of good literature and excellent storytelling such as the phenomenal work of Mariana Enríquez.
About Liliana Carstea
Liliana Carstea is a Romanian writer fascinated with the macabre, the ancient, and the magical. She lives in the UK and has a BA with Honours in Creative Writing from the University of Bedfordshire. She is currently working on her first short story collection.
Her work has appeared on Black Flowers and Civilian Global, and she was interviewed for Write or Die Tribe for the ‘In the Spotlight Series’. Some of her flash fiction stories made it to the second round in the SmokeLong Flash Fellowship for Emerging Writers in 2019. You can find her on Instagram, @adaughterofmoths, and read some of her work at www.adaughterofmoths.com
