His twilight style, a sordid mix of horror, fantasy, history and politics, has been compared to the greatest masters of the supernatural, from Stephen King to Cormac McCarthy, via Ernesto Sábato and Edgar Allan Poe. Mariana Enriquez is one of those unique voices that we strive unsuccessfully to classify, as if we doubted that such creativity, lucid, gothic, resolutely punk, could be anything other than the sum of centuries of innovation. and literary geniuses.
With the collection of short stories The dangers of smoking in bedwhich follows the reissue, published by Alto, of the novel-phenomenon Our part of the nightearlier this winter, the Argentinian writer reaffirms the sovereignty of her imagination, untying the meshes and codes of horror to insert the burden of a people broken by years of dictatorship, cruelty, injustice and censorship.
Composed of twelve stories, the collection depicts the ghosts, the victims, the oppressed of a history of corruption and violence carried out by men capable of the worst horrors to preserve their power and maintain their status quo. The writer alternately embraces spiritualism, witchcraft, sex, cannibalism and metaphysics to form a great dance as macabre as it is spellbinding.
In Mariana Enriquez’s short stories, children grow up and people disappear, but the traumas remain and are transmitted, like a curse, through the lines of women, from generation to generation. Women tortured, hungry, angry, alive in short, who captivate and frighten, vectors of dizziness, desire, shame, shock. The techniques of repression of the dictatorship – rape, propaganda, policies of enforced disappearances – take the form of ghosts, phobias, skids and other horrific mechanisms that are as effective as they are relevant.
In The little ghosts, children who died or disappeared without a trace reappear in the parks of Buenos Aires, physically intact but devoid of soul. In Well, a young woman crushed by the weight of irrational fears discovers that she has been offered as food to demons to free her ancestors. In Carriage, the author explores the intersectionality of gender and class relations through the defecation of a tramp in a neighborhood. Elsewhere, two admirers take their idol’s song lyrics literally and devour his entrails in a most sweeping homage, and a young woman is pursued by the tattered corpse of her great-great-aunt, who died while she was just a baby.
The one who is nicknamed “the dark empress of South American literature” surprises with the sobriety of her writing, yet evocative and burning, and her frank and simple tone, which clash as much as they serve the amplitude and the impetuosity of his imagination. A writer at the top of her game.