We recently discovered the Argentine novelist and journalist Mariana Enriquez with the French translation of her novel Our part of the night, published by Alto, a brick of 800 pages. Those who wish to discover his universe where morbid, horror and the realm of the dead reign can do so in a more digestible way with the collection of short stories The dangers of smoking in bedonce again translated from Spanish by Anne Plantagenet for the Quebec publishing house.
From Buenos Aires to Barcelona, from slums to ghettos, Mariana Enriquez stages a harsh and nauseating world, where people live who exist outside the system or function within it with difficulty and misery: marginalized, maladjusted, dying, young or less young. , they suffer from a mismatch with the world, which they often observe from afar, in their dirty and dilapidated apartments, in seedy bars, in neighborhoods where hope has long since vanished.
This horrible world where sometimes there is a form of beauty, however sordid it may be, is populated by missing child-revenants, curses, demons, the specter of a little child in semi-putrefaction. There is necrophagia, madness, gore, blood, bones, mutilated bodies, forbidden sexuality, perverse impulses. Yes, it’s very creepy, and Enriquez doesn’t care about taboos. There is in this exalted imagination, where the dead come to haunt a corrupt and stinking world, something that grabs and fascinates us, from which we are unable to look away. Be warned.
The dangers of smoking in bed
Mariana Enriquez (translated from Spanish by Anne Plantagenet)
Alto
200 pages