Created by Grove Atlantic and Electric Literature. Eventually, their defiance builds to a singular act of unprovoked violence. ME: I rarely write anything consciously. He invented magical beings. Things We Lost in the Fire is a searing, striking portrait of the social fabric of Argentina and the collective consciousness of a generation affected by a particular stew of history, religion and imagination. Cosas que perdimos en el fuego. published in multiple languages including English, consists of 208 pages and is available in Hardcover format for offline reading. Is there something occult about political violence? Literature can be anachronistic and prophetic at once. Peopled by apparitions, uncertainty, and colourful folk religion, the stories are set against sprawling backdrops of poverty and inequality. I since marvel at the Argentinian writer's talent to conjure up such terrifying stories from the daily Latin American everyday violence. Like they have to satisfy some ravenous and ancient god that demands not only bodies but needs to be fed their suffering as well. A demonic idol is borne on a mattress through city streets. They become obsessed with an abandoned house and leave her out of their many games and imaginings until, finally, the three decide to venture inside. A rgentinian writer Mariana Enriquez’s Things We Lost in the Fire, vividly translated by Megan McDowell, is one of my favorite short story collections from the past decade. DLR: When you talk about the PTSD that can haunt a society after the political horrors you described above, is there a related aspect to this haunting by which the sites of atrocity become fertile ground for fiction, such as the inn that used to be a police academy in “The Inn”? In “Adela’s House,” a young girl is jealous of the friendship between her brother and Adela, a neighbor. So she distorted her biography a lot in her stories. In general, I don’t think you can take the power back, not completely, but you can break the silence. Enríquez paints a vivid portrait of Buenos Aires neighborhoods that have succumbed to poverty, crime and violence. Some are mere sketches of an idea or image, like a short ghost story told by campfire. DLR: I’m interested in the relationship between brevity and the uncanny. Mariana Enriquez (Buenos Aires, 1973) es una periodista y escritora argentina. They crave evil because they feel guilty and want to be punished. How does this class line inform your overall body of work? Cortazar was the child of a diplomat and was born in Brussels. They are slightly older and allowed to watch horror movies, while she is not. I want narrative to be a way of reflecting and thinking, and thinking is complex. “But there was nothing macabre or sinister about it,” Enríquez tells us. Many of them, sleeping in doorways, hungry, filthy. To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com. You can't win a fight with someone who likes fighting. Why is fiction a more effective vessel? Do you think that following these rules—for example, knowing ahead of time that the story will end badly, almost like fate—frees you up in other ways while you’re working? Mariana Enriquez (Buenos Aires, 1973) es una periodista y escritora argentina. He is very smart, I think, a geek and a leftist but not a romantic one. Places are characters to me. Se recibió de Licenciada en Comunicación Social en la Universidad Nacional de La Plata. Do you think that there is a special power that short prose has to deal with this range of phenomena, which a long novel might lose? Mariana Enriquez has been critically lauded for her unconventional and sociopolitical stories of the macabre. Suggested PDF: Good Book: The Bizarre, Hilarious, Disturbing, Marvelous, and Inspiring Things I Learned When I Read Every Single Word of the Bible pdf Mariana Enríquez has a truly unique voice and these original, provocative stories will leave a lasting imprint. Now, Argentine writer Mariana Enríquez joins their ranks with a ravishing new story collection, The Dangers of Smoking in Bed, a volume that reimagines the Gothic and gives it a wholly original spin. And Cortazar. There’s nothing gentle about the stories in Mariana Enriquez’ Things We Lost in the Fire.This collection, translated by Megan McDowell, travels through the various neighborhoods of Buenos Aires, where the Argentinian author resides — a city haunted by the not-so-distant violence of … DLR: As a related question, do you think cities and countries grow more haunted, and more potentially supernatural, when repressive and violent regimes are in power? It’s a brave novel. ME: My favorite China novel is The City and The City. It sounded wonderfully creepy and unsettling; the Financial Times writes that it is ‘full of claustrophobic terror’, and Dave Eggers says that it ‘hits with the force of a freight train’. If you think it’s pondering how far a movement can go before it becomes self-destructive, you’re right. My stories are quite rooted in realistic urban and suburban settings and the horror just emanates from these places. Mind you, if I had some kind of extreme mental disturbance like that I’d hope my loved ones would help me, but in literature I really care about the themes of bodies and desire and don’t think they should be restrained by medical discourses, or religious or social taboos or whatever. Violence and danger are constant, shadowy presences for Enríquez’s characters. In this way, nonfiction is more about certainties, especially journalism. Se ha desempeñado profesionalmente como periodista y columnista en medios gráficos, como el suplemento Radar del diario Página/12 (donde es sub-editora) y las revistas TXT, La mano, La mujer de mi vida y El Guardián. But when faced with real horrors, we realize we’re totally powerless. Mariana Enriquez: Yes, it is something I look for. And the shadow has many forms. So they seek it to see something they don’t know, to get what they think they deserve, and in a way to see things as they really are and escape their cocoons. I don’t want to write anything with thought police on my shoulder. The thieves got into the mobile home and they didn’t realize the old lady was inside and maybe she died on them from the fright, and then they tossed her. We strive to be a platform for marginalized voices and writing that might not find a home elsewhere, and to lift up new voices alongside those of more established writers we love. In what ways do you follow the conventions of the horror genre? There’s something about the scale of the cruelty in political violence from the estate that always seems like the blackest magic to me. Synopsis from Goodreads: An arresting collection of short stories, reminiscent of Shirley Jackson and Julio Cortazar, by an exciting new international talent. “The Neighbor’s Courtyard” is a perfect melding of all of Enríquez’s priorities. The stories are never about punishing people for pursuing sexual urges that the status quo might consider illicit, and yet, still, things usually don’t end well for them. Review of Mariana Enriquez's Things We Lost in the Fire: Stories. One of the Best Works of Mariana Enriquez. Inseparable identical twin sisters ditch home together, and then one decides to vanish. And we keep on not being able to fix police brutality, inequality, abject poverty, so there’s this sense of frustration. New York, NY: Hogarth Press, 2016. I’m very different from Ocampo in that I don’t think she was interested in real events. We strive to be a platform for marginalized voices and writing that might not find a home elsewhere, and to lift up new voices alongside those of more established writers we love. His death was horrific—tortured over a fire and hung by his feet, eventually his throat was slit. English, Summary note "A haunting collection of short stories all set in Argentina" -- Provided by publisher. So I guess I write to de-normalize it for me too. Pleasure and sin. published in multiple languages including English, consists of 208 pages and is available in Hardcover format for offline reading. "Spiderweb" appeared in The New Yorker.. Save this story for later. Some places in cities and especially in the suburbia of Latin American cities—that is, in the slums and poor neighborhoods around the cities, I guess it’s very different from the concept of suburbia in North American cities—have a special feel to them related to their history. Populated by unruly teenagers, crooked witches, homeless ghosts, and hungry women, they walk the uneasy line between urban realism and horror. I don’t think my characters overcome their guilt, that’s the whole point in some stories, because their “guilt” is not individual. Ms Enriquez is a writer and editor for some newspapers and magazines established in Buenos Aires, Argentina and so all her translated short stories come from her work in her country. 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. "Mariana Enriquez’s eerie short story collection, Things We Lost in the Fire, looks at contemporary life in Argentina through a strange, surreal, and often disturbing lens. Ballard and Jackson of course. I love Silvina Ocampo, her crazy women, her humor. I don’t know if that’s empowering. In the middle of the night, invisible men pound on the shutters of a country hotel. Many of them are industries related to meat, and meat is a very Argentinian “thing.” So the river is a metaphor but also a geographical border. Why is it so important to not be a romantic in this sense? That’s my way of not being romantic: I don’t preach. David Leo Rice: One aspect of your stories that I really admire is how they inhabit specific urban or suburban settings, and yet build from there toward realms of horror that touch on the supernatural. And are they actually guilty of anything, or do they only feel this way? Like, say, Operation Condor in Latin America, where it gave help with intelligence and resources to dictatorships. Ballard are great at presenting terrifyingly plausible futures, whereas a lot of what we’ve talked about so far has to do with channeling the ghosts of the past (though perhaps the line between the two isn’t so clear, since, as you say, the places where awful things have happened may be the same places where they’ll happen again). In terms of the expansion and change of the flesh, Clive Barker is my guide. That’s why it feels so bad when it actually isn’t as bad as it used to be. 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. The line between sanity and insanity is often blurred in these stories. I think it’s related to the choice of reading and writing horror in the sense that, to me, it doesn’t feel like I’m reading very grim things. An abandoned house brims with shelves holding fingernails and teeth. This fall, I got the chance to converse via email with Mariana Enriquez, an Argentine writer whose newly translated story collection. Save this story for later. Is there a kind of madness or extremity that’s only possible to reach in a narrative if it obeys certain conventions? ME: I like frame. The thing is that all of them were very upper class people. What does it mean? We work to shine a light on stories that build bridges, tear down walls, and speak truth to power. That’s what Western culture proposes and we have internalized it and think it’s normal. So in many ways I need frame in fiction and I like the frame of horror because it’s a very wide frame. By David Wallac e. December 12, 2016. Click to share on Facebook (Opens in new window), Click to share on Twitter (Opens in new window), Click to share on Tumblr (Opens in new window). Mariana Enríquez Hogarth. A police academy during the country’s last dictatorship, the Inn was the site of unspeakable acts. In the same way, although they can be punished, they won’t find it soothing because it’s not them, individually, that deserve the punishment. I love art that sits uneasily on the border between real and imagined, or waking and dreaming, and yours does this very successfully. There’s another tradition that’s not so well known internationally of writers that come from a different background, like Manuel Puig or Roberto Arlt. But when they read it, they ask how can I go so far. For example, in my stories I often use a river south of Buenos Aires, el Riachuelo, a polluted, ugly place that marks the border of city and suburbia and is also a symbol of corruption and greed because irresponsible industries contaminated it. I’m a big fan of Robert Aickman, he’s one of my all time faves. Paula has lost her job as a social worker because of a neglectful episode, and her mental state has suffered. I do that too, but much less. ME: Yes, it’s important in the stories themselves. Suggested PDF: Good Book: The Bizarre, Hilarious, Disturbing, Marvelous, and Inspiring Things I Learned When I Read Every Single Word of the Bible pdf He is taking you to these places he knows well. The preceding is from the new Freeman’s channel at Literary Hub, which will feature excerpts from the print editions of Freeman’s, along with supplementary writing from contributors past, present and future. Any other contemporary speculative or Weird writers you’re into? At The Rumpus, we know how easy it is to find pop culture on the Internet, so we’re here to give you something more challenging, to show you how beautiful things are when you step off the beaten path. If you were to show this world to a peasant in the Middle Ages, he would be thrilled to live here and now. And many more: Kelly Link, Helen Oyeyemi, Laird Barron. I like that he’s politically aware, almost militant, and yet absolutely preoccupied with language and plot and even having fun. Argentina certainly has a history of violent governance, and as the US moves ever further in the same direction, this is an area I find myself pondering. Places where something horrible happened feel like places where something will happen again because they are haunted. The military here launched the stuff of nightmares: they disappeared people, common graves, bones unidentified. As a related question, do you think cities and countries grow more haunted, and more potentially supernatural, when repressive and violent regimes are in power? What is the connection here? Before Gil died, he warned his murderer to pray for him, or else the man’s son would die of a mysterious illness. Although he also takes guests to “the Salamanca cave, where he told them ghost stories about meetings between witches and devils, or about stinking goats with red eyes,” stories of actual barbarity are banned. I also like M. John Harrison. Like you, he’s great at writing politically informed work that nevertheless isn’t an allegory or a metaphor—it’s a real story that takes itself seriously on the level of the narrative, not just as a means of making a political point. In “The Dirty Kid,” when a child is found decapitated, a young woman wonders if it’s the same boy she spent an afternoon with when his drug-addicted mother disappeared. Contents I read in “Rambla triste” [Sad Rambla], one of the tales in the first book of short stories by Mariana Enriquez, Los peligros de fumar en la cama [The dangers of smoking in bed] (2009): “It was possible that the stuffy nose brought on by her cold—she always picked up some sort of virus on airplanes—distorted her sense of smell.” But aside from politics and history (something that I really care about, which is normal being a middle class Argentinian from a politically aware family), I think political violence leaves scars, like a national PTSD. https://electricliterature.com/the-dark-themes-of-mariana-enriquez I need to be engaged, as a writer and as a reader, with the characters. Here, the story spins from reality to nightmare. Mariana Enriquez’s Things We Lost in the Fire (review copy courtesy of Portobello Books) is a collection of twelve excellent stories set in the writer’s home country. DLR: When you say that your stories “end badly but it’s more a matter of genre,” this makes a lot of sense to me. And yeah, they end badly, but it’s more a matter of genre. He dedicated a short story to Lovecraft. You can throw politics in there, which I do. ME: I read a lot of psychogeography when I was younger. Often it’s difficult to distinguish Enríquez’s female protagonists from one another. What have you taken from her in terms of your own development, and also how would you say that your work is most different from hers? This income helps us keep the magazine alive. Your support is critical to our existence. Mariana Enríquez’s latest collection to be published in English, which first appeared in Spanish in 2009 and has now been shortlisted for the Save this story for later. It’s very difficult to even mention the influence of Borges because he was such a monster, but what I always loved about him was his lack of prejudice. That’s quite hard to maintain in a long novel. There’s always politics in horror. Submitted by The Booker Prizes on Wed, 21/04/2021 - 12:42. And Iain Sinclair just amazes me, though his writing can be difficult. When I wrote it, I was thinking about violence against women and all the angles appeared and I just let them be. I just enjoy them aesthetically. Throughout the city, men start burning their wives and girlfriends. Things We Lost in the Fire, a twelve story collection by Argentinian author Mariana Enriquez, captures the spirit of the author’s home country.After two novels, a novella, and a volume of travel writing, this short story collection is the first of the author’s work to … What do you take from him? If so, what is it? I. Around here you can just toss anyone, there’s no frickin’ way they’ll find you. “An Invocation” features a bus tour guide who is obsessed with the Big-Eared Runt, a serial killer who began killing at the young age of nine. They are marked. The latest issue of Freeman’s, a special edition featuring 29 of the best emerging writers from around the world, is available now. These stories are told in the same breath as actual ghost stories; often, Enríquez’s tales jolt from reality to magical realism with dizzying speed. The fact that in most of the world today we have the information to know about injustice and are powerless or, in most cases, careless about it, is a form of horror. In the story “No Flesh Over Our Bones,” I’m writing about fascination with death and ultimately about anorexia and a woman’s desire to look like a skeleton because I feel that is a legitimate desire, a desire to be respected and not judged. DLR: On a related note, many of your stories, such as “Where Are You, Sweetheart,” deal very explicitly with sexual desire, which in turn dovetails with a lot of the horror that occurs. What is your feeling about the ways in which your characters seek out horror? I take from him the idea that evil can be satisfying and instructive in a way. The house buzzes, glass shelves are lined with teeth and fingernails. If so, why do you think such potent horror is to be found in these border-places? Richard Gavin, Neil Gaiman, Alan Moore, just many. My style is perhaps less “precious,” and the approach is absolutely from the perspective of the underprivileged. The girls spend their days and nights acting out: cruising around in someone’s boyfriend’s van, being promiscuous, taking drugs. Find her online at www.maryvenselwhite.com. Writers of the city and of small towns, poor, interested in pop culture, in the way people talk, in street stuff, in movies, in the occult but from a less elitist perspective. Very few people actually read him I think, that’s the reason. This violent story is an everyday part of life in these neighborhoods. DLR: My last question is about the future. ME: I think, and this is very non-rational—it happens after I read the stories that I realize it—they crave danger. https://lithub.com/mariana-enriquez-on-political-violence-and-writing-horror Se recibió de Licenciada en Comunicación Social en la Universidad Nacional de La Plata. At The Rumpus, we know how easy it is to find pop culture on the Internet, so we’re here to give you something more challenging, to show you how beautiful things are when you step off the beaten path. And if you think it’s a modern witch tale, yeah it is. Throughout the neighborhoods of sprawling Buenos Aires, where many of Enríquez’s stories are set, shrines and altars can be found in his honor, bearing plaster replicas of the saint, often decorated with bright red reminders of his bloody death. If so, what common thread, either artistically or culturally, do you take from them? A couple of years ago I became acquainted with Mariana Enriquez's storytelling. The influence is unavoidable. One of them, and sometimes I think it’s the most atrocious, is the people that, nowadays, think the dictatorship and its brutality were necessary to defeat the “internal enemy.” Nowadays we have a democratic president (I don’t like him but hey, politicians are horrible worldwide), but the shadow of the past lingers. I think about specific place descriptions—they make the story you’re telling more vivid, not just more believable. You can’t save yourself alone. I can see the through-line from his work to yours, especially the idea of taking pleasure from pain, and craving evil as a way of easing feelings of guilt. As a Bookshop affiliate and an Amazon Associate, The Rumpus earns a percentage from qualifying purchases. After a stint in the army, Antonio Mamerto Gil Núñez (the saint’s full name) became a Robin Hood figure, beloved by the poor of the country. If you think it’s a Ballardian near-future dystopia, it’s that too. He loved Bradbury. Not enough to put them in her fiction. We’ve only gotten better. Other stories don’t feel as complete. When she moves into a new home with her husband, rifts in their marriage widen. Ocampo was a millionaire; her family still owns land everywhere. How did you first get into his work, and how do you see it relating to yours? How can writers find fresh ways of expressing the everyday horrors that are so quickly normalized by the population as a whole? More from this author →, Tags: Argentina, book review, Gauchito Gil, Mariana Enriquez, Mary Vensel White, review, Things We Lost in the Fire. Mariana Enríquez (Buenos Aires, 1973) is an Argentine journalist, novelist, and short story writer. W hen it comes to book reviewing cliches, the word “haunting” is surely among the tattiest, yet Mariana Enríquez’s newly translated short story collection restores to that tired adjective all its most mysterious, fearful strangeness.. Fiction is slower; fiction has time. We spoke to Mariana Enríquez and Megan McDowell about the longlisted book The Dangers … Feminist resistance is perhaps nowhere more evident than in the title story, “Things We Lost in the Fire.” It’s a short fable about a girl who has been burned by her husband and rides around the subway telling her tale. Could this be a way of taking some power back from the “ravenous and ancient god” you mention? But the stories with more fully developed characters resonate, even as they delve into horror and the supernatural. Journalism is history made in the heat of the moment and it’s faster. 2021. If you want to think that a story like “Things We Lost in the Fire” is a feminist call to arms, well, it is. Delivery charges may apply. She sees a child chained in the courtyard next door, but her husband thinks it’s a symptom of her imbalance, a hallucination. That’s for real life. So now we know all the bad that is going on, for the first time, and this big cloud of information leaves us overwhelmed and very conscious of how little we can do. Enriquez, Mariana. ME: Well, traditions work that way. So yes it’s normalized on a surface level, but not really. In some cases, the characters are involved in social situations that they just can’t fix. But we’re not going to die; we’re going to flaunt our scars.” Self-mutilation as a method of resistance is a difficult thing to contemplate, and Enríquez keeps her focus steady in this disconcerting story. Say a little bit about your process of navigating these two areas—the allegorical and the narrative. When fiction does the trick of moving people, it’s like they can look at it again. Things We Lost in the Fire by Mariana Enríquez. 202 pages. Mariana Enriquez on Teen-Age Desire. Is this a line that you are consciously seeking while you work? And yes, to me extremity works better with a frame—otherwise it’s just a collection of scenes. Mariana Enriquez (AR) er en mester i den gotiske realismen. "The Intoxicated Years" was published in Granta. In “The Inn,” another tour guide in the small town of Sanagasta tells the history of the town’s Inn and loses his job for it. I’m closer to them in terms of class, and in some ways also in terms of literature. “Spiderweb” is the story of a woman trapped in a bad marriage; “No Flesh Over Our Bones” follows the evolving relationship between a woman and the anthropomorphized skull she keeps, possibly as a way to break things off with her boyfriend. That child in the story seems like an exception, but he’s not. Children were kidnapped from their parents and given to other families. Is horror thus sometimes a positive force, or at least an attractive one? One of the Best Works of Mariana Enriquez. From the classic The Invention of Morel by Adolfo Bioy Casares … It has many more interpretations because it’s not served to you with opinions. The Dangers of Smoking in Bed by Mariana Enríquez, translated by Megan McDowell, is published by Granta (£12.99). “There’s something about the scale of the cruelty in political violence from the estate that always seems like the blackest magic to me.”, “It’s very difficult to even mention the influence of Borges because he was such a monster, but what I always loved about him was his lack of prejudice.”, “I don’t think my characters overcome their guilt, that’s the whole point in some stories, because their ‘guilt’ is not individual.”. I let myself write about politics and, in the narrative, let the contradictions appear, the prejudice, the things I’m not very sure about. Is there something occult about political violence? ME: Well, when I think a story up I try to avoid any political “correctness” stemming from my own personal set of beliefs. I’m thinking of a story like “The Dirty Kid,” where a woman living in a mansion has a life-changing encounter with an extremely impoverished street kid. Do you think that the transition or interconnection of these worlds is important in your stories themselves, as well as in your style and approach? A new president has recently taken office, and circumstances at their homes are repressive. Welcome to The Rumpus! The talented Bennett fuels her fiction with secrets—first in her lauded debut, The Mothers (2016), and now in the assured and magnetic story of the Vignes sisters, light-skinned women parked on opposite sides of the color line. I know you’ve written a book on Ocampo, whose work I love as well. Argentina certainly has a history of violent governance, and as the US moves ever further in the same direction, this is an area I find myself pondering. The Rumpus NewsletterGet Our Overly PersonalEmail Newsletter. I like imaginary or more “classic” tales, but I don’t find them fierce or powerful anymore. As a protest to these femicides, a group of women devises a vendetta by resignifying a In regards to my country, I’m pretty sure it’s going to shit again; it’s a bit of a loop here. The Rumpus is a place where people come to be themselves through their writing, to tell their stories or speak their minds in the most artful and authentic way they know how. Macabre, disturbing and exhilarating, Things We Lost in the Fire is a collection… So it’s also a time of defeat and hopelessness. Se ha desempeñado profesionalmente como periodista y columnista en medios gráficos, como el suplemento Radar del diario Página/12 (donde es sub-editora) y las revistas TXT, La mano, La mujer de mi vida y El Guardián. Maybe that’s why it’s more effective, because it’s maddening in a way. I believe in the spirit of places. An emaciated, nude boy lies chained in a neighbor’s courtyard. The story culminates when Paula ventures into the house and the boy, suddenly turned demon, sinks his saw-like teeth into her cat. He could never shake his French accent. The concentration camps were sometimes military spots or police stations, but others could be schools shut down for the purpose of holding prisoners.

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