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Enriquez, Mariana

Entry updated 11 December 2023. Tagged: Author.

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(1973-    ) Argentinian journalist and author, active from the early 1990s, most of whose early work is unrelentingly focused on the condition of Argentina, and the profoundly distressed survivor generation which came to adulthood in the poison shadow of the dictatorship that ruled Argentina between 1976 and 1983. Though transgressive and exorbitant, this early work does not generally interact with the modes of telling the world provided by Fantastika in general. Two collections of interest in the context of this encyclopedia have, however, been translated. Both Los peligros de fumar en la cama (coll 2009; trans Megan McDowell as The Dangers of Smoking in Bed 2021) and Las cosas que perdimos en el fuego (coll 2016; trans Megan McDowell as Things We Lost in the Fire 2017) do ingeniously interrogate the world through variations on horror topoi (see Horror in SF).

This use of horror-related fantastika to represent (rather than affright) the world is much intensified in Nuestra parte de noche (2019; trans Megan McDowell as Our Share of Night 2019), set during and after the time of the dictators Argentina, whose maiming of the land did not end in 1983 but, as it were, changed hats; the Secret Masters who retain some covert sway over the world may be defeated at the end of the tale, but within a frame that makes it clear that the Gods and Demons they serve remain ravenous. The negotiations in Our Share of Night between a human Pariah Elite and the true rulers of the world evoke in sf terms some sense that Homo sapiens may be a puppet species under Forerunner sway, with hints of the Cthulhu Mythos surfacing at points; other twenty-first century texts to focus on negotiated terror include John Connolly's A Book of Bones (2019) and David Mitchell's The Bone Clocks (2014). Through the text, consanguinities appear with the work of Roberto Bolaño: the very extensive recountings of adolescent groupings evokes The Savage Detectives (1998); while a sense that humanity has trapped itself in an arena with no exit evokes 2666 (2004). It is never easy in extremely long tales like these three, with their multiple interconnections, to distinguish the most grotesque tropes out of horror and traditional legend from "reality": but Bolano and Enriquez do express very similarly one central terror: that the world is recognized.[JC]

Mariana Enríquez

born Buenos Aires, Argentina: 6 December 1973

works (selected)

  • Nuestra parte de noche (Barcelona, Spain: Editorial Anagrama, 2019) [in the publisher's Narrativas hispánicas series: pb/]
    • Our Share of Night (London: Granta, 2022) [trans by Megan McDowell of the above: hb/Pablo Gerardo Camacho]

collections and stories

links

previous versions of this entry



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