![]() She describes the girl’s thought process, the fear of being in a dark, haunted house with her brother Pablo and their friend Adela – the two of them sharing an affinity for horror films –, and her attempt at making sense of her experience. McDowell, replicating a young girl’s voice here, uses contractions, though doesn’t slip into slang. When I looked up to see what was on the third shelf, the light went out. Molars with black lead in the center, like my father’s, who’d had them fixed incisors, like the ones that bothered me when I started wearing a retainer or sharp canines that reminded me of Roxana, the loudmouthed girl who sat in front of me in school. On the next shelf, higher up, were teeth. I hugged Pablo, but I didn’t stop looking. In “Adela’s House,” a more classical horror story featuring a haunted house, terror arises between the spaced-out descriptions and short sentences: In line with this observation, McDowell’s translation is often almost mundane in tone, which increases the shock effect when it comes. McDowell notes, “Mariana Enriquez’s particular genius catches us off guard by how quickly we can slip from the familiar into a new and unknown horror” (Enriquez, 202). The uncanny derives from this parallelism between a cozy world and surrealist events, whereby one can turn into the other without warning. Just below the surface lurks the harsh reality of life in the deprived neighborhoods of a major Latin American city, marked by inequalities – all of Enriquez’s protagonists are women and many are children or young adults –, poverty, drug abuse, and a clinging onto folk beliefs. On the surface, the reader encounters a reality that mixes realism with magical events, though concluding from this that Enriquez writes magical realism is a hasty and erroneous comparison. Like many of the adolescent democracies of the Southern Cone, the country is haunted by the spectre of recent dictatorships, and the memory of violence there is still raw. As McDowell writes in her Translator’s Note:Ī shadow hangs over Argentina and its literature. I am certain that my captivation results from the fact that there is more to Enriquez’s stories than the “mere” gothic, often cruel horror they express: Her setting is Argentina, predominantly the various neighborhoods of Buenos Aires, and while the time period remains unspecified, the ghosts of multiple dictatorships haunt the collection. When I reread the story in the collection, I was surprised that it should only be barely 6 pages long, considering the eerie narrative with its uncertain ending had me gripped for days afterwards: a woman finds a skull in the street and becomes fixated on it, to the extent that she chooses “Vera,” the skull, over her live-in-boyfriend and lies to her mother about her obsession. Enriquez’s voice captivated me: She read McDowell’s translation of her short story “No Flesh Over Our Bones” as if it were her own text. ![]() Twice, in fact: At the official reading, and at a more informal evening event with readings and music in a cabaret-style circus tent. ![]() At the Edinburgh International Book Festival last summer, I heard Mariana Enriquez read from her short story collection Things We Lost in the Fire, the first English translation of her work, by Megan McDowell.
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