In the 1970s and ‘80s, during Argentina’s so-called “Guerra sucia” — “Dirty War” — a fascist military junta ruled with a bloody fist, executing tens of thousands of citizens.
A collection of horror stories takes on Argentina and its (horrifying) history
FICTION: There may be a Nobel Prize in the future for its author, Mariana Enriquez.
For the Minnesota Star Tribune
September 10, 2024 at 12:30PM
That nation’s writers still grapple with this heinous legacy, the great Mariana Enriquez at the forefront. Translated by the prodigious Megan McDowell, Enriquez’s new “A Sunny Place for Shady People” oozes horror tropes — gore, ghosts, monsters, haunted towns, roadside shrines to obscure saints— that reflect the atrocities we inflict on each other. Hers is a Gothic vision on steroids, and yet more is more.
A divorced physician narrates “My Sad Dead,” conversing with the deceased, reminiscent of M. Night Shyamalan’s “The Sixth Sense.” The title story, set in Los Angeles, evokes Skid Row and the sadistic serial killer Richard Ramirez. Enriquez twists and maims her characters with abandon, manipulating them like a skilled puppeteer.
“Face of Disgrace” experiments with a roving point of view, flipping between first- and third-person while unraveling the long tail of a vicious crime — the rape of a 14-year-old girl — and its disfiguring trauma across generations.
Alex, the protagonist, and brother Diego stare in stunned disbelief as her face literally erases — nose, mouth, eyes — exposing a deeper emotional blight: “The years-long anger that had made her tear sheets and punch brick and bang her head against the wall was sliding through her fingers like sand because she had, finally, gotten to the heart of the damage.” (Enriquez alludes to Robert W. Chambers’ classic “The King In Yellow,” which inspired the debut season of “True Detective.”)
Erased features, scarred skin, gangrenous limbs, zombie corpses: Enriquez piles it on. But she imbues her grisly imagery with literary purpose.
“Metamorphosis” is a hilariously feminist retelling of Kafka: A middle-aged woman undergoes a hysterectomy, her surgeon removing benign fibroids. She keeps the largest one, weighing in at two kilos: “It was beautiful. A pale pink egg of flesh, irrigated with veins, it had a kind of tuber-like head . . . as if it were still growing. Like a hormonal ginger root. Like a fat mandrake.” She enlists an underground specialist to implant it along her vertebra, her back’s contour “dragon-like . . . iridescent. A false saurian spine.” The divided self is made whole again.
Enriquez is consumed by recent Argentine history, but she dribbles it out with the subtlety of a master chef. “Hyena Hymns” is perhaps the most overtly political story: A gay couple explores the ruins of a manor once used as a torture chamber, stumbling onto a carnival of the damned.
Like Susan Sontag, Enríquez unflinchingly regards the pain of others. In “The Suffering Woman,” a cosmetics artist glimpses an adjacent reality through a bathroom mirror. There, a young mother navigates the end stage of cancer: scalp bald, cheeks withered, belly swollen. Her husband weeps, face in his hands, inconsolable. This illusion plays on repeat, a spectral video, punching into our world.
As the author suggests, the past can’t simply wash away, and yet we somehow heal. With its occult elements and cast, “A Sunny Place for Shady People” feels as vivid and essential as Kafka’s tales. Considered by many to be a Nobel contender, Enríquez is surely on a path to Stockholm.
Hamilton Cain, who also reviews for the New York Times Book Review and Washington Post, lives in Brooklyn, New York.
A Sunny Place for Shady People
By: Mariana Enriquez, translated from Spanish by Megan McDowell.
Publisher: Hogarth, 272 pages, $28.
