An outsider comes in to investigate, and ultimately flees a danger never made fully clear. It is a story that shares echoes with Schweblin's Fever Dream, in that belief in the occult becomes confused with the damaging physiological effects of certain poisons. Kenyon College In the Villa, shes startled by silence. 'Things We Lost in the Fire' by Mariana Enriquez is a terrific - Reddit Her absence is absolutely not due to nefarious extraterrestrial body-snatching, we promise. Considering her writings overlap between Borges and King, Ocampo and Jackson, an accurate term might be 'black magical realism', and its possible this strange genre brew is a result of Enriquez' historical vantage point; born just prior to the coup but too young to be complicit, or even fully aware. The dictatorship killed or helped to make important Argentinean writers disappear, like Haroldo Conti, Rodolfo Walsh, and Paco Urondo. The district attorney could have stayed in the car, or stayed in her office, behind brick and glass. I remember having a conversation with a friend and saying, 'But you never complain when men are portrayed as corrupt politicians, violent cops, serial killers. An abandoned house brims with shelves holding fingernails and teeth. By rejecting non-essential cookies, Reddit may still use certain cookies to ensure the proper functionality of our platform. Get new fiction, essays, and poetry delivered to your inbox. Theyre ancient, theyre the stories we told orally. The truth is that I dont think too much about readers from any part of the world. This is a police force tainted by recent history, an aftershock of a violent past. So you could say that Im working on a novel and on another short storybook. Beyond this empty area live the citys poor by the thousands. Electric Literature is a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization founded in 2009. Translation: Under the Black Water [English] (2017) El chico sucio (2016) also appeared as: Translation: The Dirty Kid [English] (2017) Emanuel means god is with us. But what god? Clearly these acts, and the concomitant economic instability and corruption, provide the earth for Enriquezs tales. The police brutality, I think yeah, if you have to choose something as an echo of that [the dictatorship]. Isolated locals take dubious actions around a nearby body of water, resulting in children born wrong. A new and suspicious religion drives Christianity from the community. Cookie Notice The title story almost takes up where Spiderweb left off, with women protesting domestic violence with a violence of their own. I write for myself, thinking about my country and its reality.. All of this is added to the deconstruction of subjugating courtly love, and to the sacralization and sublimation of sex, crystallized in the many women who dominate, objectify, and consume men in her stories. Then she runs, trying to ignore the agitation of the water that should be able to breathe, or move. Yamil Corvalns body has already washed up, a kilometer from the bridge. Copyright 2023 Kenyon Review. It's clear that nothing has healed. The rivers dead, unable to breathe. New York, NY: Hogarth Press, 2016. Then she runs, trying to ignore the agitation of the water that should be able to breathe, or move. Enrquez gives us a familiar plot setup: the ups and downs, the conflicts and friendship among three teenaged girls. He hasnt brought a lawyerafter all, he says, hes innocent. With Enriquez, literature invokes social ghosts that recall recent Argentine historyimmigrants, homeless children, slum-dwellers, and others who lead excluded, precarious lives that dont matteraestheticized in tales of true political horror like Under the Black Water, El desentierro de la angelita [The little angels disinterment], Rambla Triste [Sad Rambla], Chicos que vuelven [Kids who come back], Cuando hablbamos con los muertos [When we talked to the dead], and the particularly biting The Dirty Kid, which tells of the effects of both drug trafficking and witchcraft (a pregnant addict sacrifices her children to San La Muerte) in harsh urban neighborhoods, like the Constitucin barrio of Buenos Aires. I mean, one of the places where I had the most fear in my life was a Backstreet Boys concert, Enriquez says, with no hint of mockery. $24.00. Patricia Grodd Poetry Prize for Young Writers. Instead theres a wooden pool topped with a freshly slaughtered cows head. under the black water mariana enriquez. [Scheduled] South American: Things We Lost in the Fire, by Mariana Enriquez, "Under the Black Water" Welcome to the discussion of "Under the Black Water," the 10th story from Mariana Enrquez's Things We Lost in the Fireshort story collection. Birthplace: Buenos Aires, Argentina Birthdate: December 1973 . He passes her, gliding toward the church. Isolated locals take dubious actions around a nearby body of water, resulting in children born wrong. A new and suspicious religion drives Christianity from the community. Spoilers ahead. In the distance, she hears drums. The children born with those defects are, alas, treated more as symbols than characters, or as indications that the river leaches humanity. The blend of horror, fantasy, crime, and cruelty has a particular Argentine pedigree. Things We Lost in the Fire, by Mariana Enrquez - A Bookish Type By accepting all cookies, you agree to our use of cookies to deliver and maintain our services and site, improve the quality of Reddit, personalize Reddit content and advertising, and measure the effectiveness of advertising. People swimming under the black water, they woke the thing up. After all, a living boy is one less crime to accuse the cops of. "Building Mariana Enriquez: Ten Theses" by Pablo Brescia - LALT And then, of course, its even worse than that: a mutant child, rotting meat, a thing with gray arms, all vivid and inexplicable. What got into you? Violence flaunts itself, intruding on everyday life. In one story, "Under the Black Water," a severely polluted river that has become a dumping ground for victims of police violence becomes a source of a zombie cult. But then, that sort of thing happens a lot in the Villa Moreno slum, and convictions are few. Our Privacy Notice has been updated to explain how we use cookies, which you accept by continuing to use this website. You Are Here: ross dress for less throw blankets apprentissage des lettres de l'alphabet under the black water mariana enriquez. She leaves the church crying and shaking. The priest refers to them as retards, but the narrative itself isnt doing much better. Shadow Over Argentina: Mariana Enriquez's "Under the Black Water" What he separated from Argentinian literature was the obligation to be solemn, to talk about politics to put imagination aside because these things were too serious to be contaminated by genre, let it be horror, fantasy, humour, whatever I can cross it [the socio-political situation] with genre and not be scared and think, 'Ah, Im going to talk about the disappeared in a horror story, this is totally disrespectful.' Because even if its a long time ago, even if they are trained as a democratic force, theres still a sediment there of that brutality and impunity the power that they used to have over the people that somehow is still there., The collection's translator, Megan McDowell, states so perfectly in an excellent afterword: The horror comes not only from turning our gaze on desperate populations; it comes from realizing the extent of our blindness. This feeds well into Enriquez reply to me when asked why she focusses on the darker side of her country. Mariana Enriquez mesmerizing short story collection, Things We Lost in the Fire, is filled with vibrant depictions of her native Argentina, mostly Buenos Aires, as well as some ventures to surrounding countries. "Our Lady of the Quarry" | The New Yorker Under the Black Water isnt quite a Shadow Over Innsmouth retelling, but it riffs on the same tune. (Its the most remarkable word weve ever seen.) It was like the Furies. Normally there are people. Instead we get deformed children with their skinny arms and mollusk fingers, followed by women, most of them fat, their bodies disfigured by a diet based on carbs.. I felt unpleasant echoes of That Only a Mother, a much-reprinted golden age SF story in which the shocking twist at the end is that the otherwise precocious baby hasnt got any limbs (and, unintentionally, that the society in question hasnt got a clue about prosthetics). Fear, as an emotion, the ultimate puppeteer. And he wants to meet Pinat. To withdraw your consent, see Your Choices. In the slum Buenos Aires frays into abandoned storefronts, and an oil-filled river decomposes into dangerous and deliberate putrescence.. 'Things We Lost in the Fire' by Mariana Enriquez (Review) We dont know what the awful spectre is, gray and dripping, that sits on the bed with its bloody teeth. Translation is its own art, of course, and je ne parle pas Espanol, so the story Ive actually read may be as much the work of Megan McDowel as Enriquez. Horror is the drop of blood that flowers in the clear water of her social commentary. She met Father Francisco, who told her that no one even came to church. The Dark Themes of Mariana Enriquez - Electric Literature Ruthanna Emrysis the author of the Innsmouth Legacy series, includingWinter TideandDeep Roots. and our And for those boys? Ruthanna Emrys and Anne M. Pillsworth. Defiled churches, shambling inhuman processions hey. Whats Cyclopean: This is very much a place-as-character story. Never. But now he knows: they were trying to cover something up, keep it from getting out. Mythos Making: The graffiti on the church includes the name Yog Sothoth amid its seeming gobbledygook. Hes only been back a little while. With undergraduate and doctorate degrees in Hispanic Philology and an undergraduate degree in Social and Cultural Anthropology from the University of Granada, she has been a contractor with the Ramn y Cajal Program and a visiting researcher at the University of California, Los Angeles, Princeton, Paris-Sorbonne University, the University of Buenos Aires, and Yale. The chairs have been cleared out, along with the crucifix and the images of Jesus and Our Lady. angelita" [The little angel's disinterment], . Its stench, he said, was caused by its lack of oxygen. Next week, Lovecraft and Henry S. Whitehead explain why you should be more careful about mirrors in The Trap.. Hey, wait a seconddoes this sound familiar to anyone else? The tradition of horror and mystery stories fascinates me. Our mission is to amplify the power of storytelling with digital innovation, and to ensure that literature remains a vibrant presence in popular culture by supporting writers, embracing new technologies, and building community to broaden the audience for literature. This article about a collection of horror short stories published in the 2010s is a stub. But hes not getting out, and neither is she. OK, nice, is her reply. Theyre carrying a bed, with some human effigy lying on it. Mary Shelleys Frankenstein, 1818), as well as the image of the young woman who is simultaneously a victim and a monstrous killer, became tropes in the works of well known women authors such as Ann Radcliffe, Kate Chopin, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman, whose tutelary shadows fall over the poetics of Mariana Enriquez. A DEAD BABY and her haunted great-niece open The Dangers of Smoking in Bed, Mariana Enriquez's collection of disquieting short stories. Emanuel means god is with us. But what god? The psychic interiority of broaching ones own darkness is the mainstay of horror fiction, the genre to which these stories clearly belong. On Things We Lost in the Fire by Mariana Enriquez Meet Mariana Enriquez, Argentine journalist and author, whose short stories are of decapitated street kids (heads skinned to the bone), ritual sacrifice and ghoulish children sporting sharpened teeth. She dreamed that when the boy emerged from the water and shook off the muck, the fingers fell off his hands.. Meet Mariana Enriquez, Argentine journalist and author, whose short stories are of decapitated street kids (heads skinned to the bone), ritual sacrifice and ghoulish children sporting sharpened teeth. The proximity of others without these basic amenities creates a fragility in the better-off. Much of Black Waters horror is the surreal constraints of poverty, pollution, and corrupt authority. I mention speaking with Argentine author Csar Aira just the week previous. Shes trying to get a glimpse when the thing moves, and its gray arm falls over the side. This type of story-action creates enlightened, involved readers, and this, in my view, makes her fiction necessary. Shadow Over Argentina: Mariana Enriquezs Under the Black Water. (Its the most remarkable word weve ever seen.) Through them, Enriquez explores tourism in Argentina, the rich visiting the slums, plus so many more dynamic perspectives on her homecountry. That is to sayI primarily write thinking about Argentina, and in a larger context about Latin America, because we share many similar realities. [Scheduled] South American: Things We Lost in the Fire, by Mariana Enriquez, "Under the Black Water", Scan this QR code to download the app now. What makes you do something like that? But behind her, footsteps squelch: one of the deformed children. The body of Emanuel Lpez, the second boy, still hasnt surfaced. Thats roughly the mechanism of my stories, I get my inspiration from a real life event and then I transform it into something fantastical or supernatural. Enriquezs seams are fine ones. When I wrote "Our Lady," I was obsessed with teen-age girls and with my own teen-age years. 208 pages. Oh come, Emanuel? Just a while ago an English work of Antonio Di Benedetto was recovered. Already in 1976, Ellen Moers had coined the term female gothic to refer to women writers who cultivated this genre as a subversive space in which to display the social and political oppression of women, the confinement of their bodies, the marginalization of their work, and the impossibility of their expressing their sexual freedom. Before she can react, he shoots himself. Of murdered teens who return from beneath dark polluted waters. The slum spreads along the black river, to the limits of vision. Welcome back to the Lovecraft reread, in which two modern Mythos writers get girl cooties all over old Howards sandbox, from those who inspired him to those who were inspired in turn. The themes of horror and fantasy work for me in two ways. And her gun, of course. Silvina, the protagonist of Things We Lost in the Fire, is not yet all the way committed to the protest movement. We dont know who has taken away a vanished girl, or murdered a child, or consumed a husband. [3] Contents The protagonists in Enriquezs stories are mostly aware of their privilege, if its a privilege to have a place to live, food to eat, a face thats not grotesquely disfigured. [2] Mariana Enriquez: When I was a girl, the first things I read were horror and fantasy. The full schedule can be found here and the marginalia can be found here. Her young adult Mythos novel,Summoned, is available from Tor Teen along with sequelFathomless. The Degenerate Dutch: The rivers pollution causes birth defects. Enriquez: No, theres not. "Things We Lost in the Fire by Mariana Enriquez | PenguinRandomHouse.com: Books", "Things We Lost in the Fire by Mariana Enrquez review gruesome short stories", "Brooding Books for the Dark Days of Winter", https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Things_We_Lost_in_the_Fire_(story_collection)&oldid=1136661150, This page was last edited on 31 January 2023, at 13:55. How do they affect women? That pause before the inevitable is the space of fabulist fiction, torqueing open the rigid rules of reality to create a gap of possibility. I interviewed Enriquez via email; I wrote to her in English and she responded in Spanish, with Jill Swanson then translating. Adam Vitcavage is a Phoenix-based writer whose criticism and interviews have appeared in Electric Literature, Paste Magazine, The Millions, and more. Early life Enrquez was born in 1973 in Buenos Aires, [1] and grew up in Valentn Alsina, a suburb in the Greater Buenos Aires metropolitan area. Just a few months ago, she helped win a case against a tannery that dumped toxic waste in the river for decades, causing a massive cluster of childhood cancers and birth defects: extra arms, cat-like noses, blind high-set eyes. Site made in collaboration with CMYK. Mythos Making: The graffiti on the church includes the name Yog Sothoth amid its seeming gobbledygook. Defiled churches, shambling inhuman processions hey. In The Dirty Kid, a begging child ostentatiously shakes the hand of subway passengers, soiling them deliberately. New York. The gothic was born in the English language in the eighteenth century, with Walpole, to name tales of mystery and fear that transgress reason, common sense, and the positive order of the world. Finn House Its not that her protagonists fear a slide into poverty, but that the niceness of their lives is so clearly perched on evil filth. Her father, who once worked on a River Barge, told stories of the water running red. A few years ago in Buenos Aires, two policemen detained two poor, young men who were coming back from a night club. Well, maybe not always that last. Hes emaciated, dirty, his hair overgrown and greasy. Mariana Enriquez (Buenos Aires, 1973) has published novelsincluding Our Share of Night, which won the famous Premio Herraldeand the short story collections Dangers of Smoking in Bed and Things We Lost in the Fire, which sold to 20 international publishers before it was even published in Spanish and won the Premio You can help Wikipedia by expanding it. Norman, OK 73019-4037, Building Mariana Enriquez: Ten Theses by Pablo Brescia, Nuestra parte de noche: Reading Mariana Enriquez and the Problems of the Political by Marcelo Rioseco, The Graphic Novel Captures the Moments that the Camera Missed: An Interview with Augusto Mora. She lives in Edgewood, a Victorian trolley car suburb of Providence, Rhode Island, uncomfortably near Joseph Curwens underground laboratory. I work as a journalist and its difficult to find the time to write. Dont you hear them? For years, he says, he thought the rotted river a sign of ineptitude. Enjoy strange, diverting work from The Commuter on Mondays, absorbing fiction from Recommended Reading on Wednesdays, and a roundup of our best work of the week on Fridays. Every author is very different but they account for the wide breadth of current Argentinian literature. But I think that readers can gather that Argentina is a diverse and unequalsociety. Currently, theyre trying to clean it up, but it will take decades. But then, that sort of thing happens a lot in the Villa Moreno slum, and convictions are few. Theyre carrying a bed, with some human effigy lying on it. And in the rest of the ever-more gothified and gorified world. Spoilers ahead. [2] " Spiderweb" appeared in The New Yorker. There are hints of sacrifice, mysterious deaths of the young. We publish your favorite authorseven the ones you haven't read yet. Also hes very, very drunk. Loading. But, in my opinion, she goes further, developing what we might call a gothic feminism that proclaims the empowerment of women, building upon the sinister, as a process of subjectivization. Shadow Over Argentina: Mariana Enriquez's "Under the Black Water". In "Under the Black Water" from Things We Lost in the Fire, I read: "It was a procession. I want my stories to have an air of familiarity, especially those in a collection or in a book. And of course, whatever lies beneath the river might have been less malevolent, if it hadnt spent all that time bathing its ectoplasm in toxic sludge. But the next day, when she tries to call people in the slum, none of her contacts answer. by Mariana Enriquez. Welcome back to the Lovecraft reread, in which two modern Mythos writers get girl cooties all over old Howards sandbox, from those who inspired him to those who were inspired in turn. Our Privacy Notice has been updated to explain how we use cookies, which you accept by continuing to use this website. Turning to Latin American literature, we observe that the gothic has borne relatively little fruit, often considered a subgenre within the fantastic, science fiction, or magical realism (see Brescia, Negroni, Braham, Dez Cobo, Casanova-Vizcano, and Ordiz). Never mind how the priest knows shes there about Emanuel, or knows about the pregnant girl who pointed her this way. Enriquezs writing is therefore often in the first person, both singular and plural, and extraordinary elements enter into this fiction through the sense of smell (El carrito [The cart]), hearing (Dnde ests corazn [Where are you, darling]), taste (Carne [Meat]), sight (Ni cumpleaos ni bautismos), and touch (Los peligros de fumar en la cama [The dangers of smoking in bed]). They inhabit the same plane, stalk the same prey; both are offered equality in terror. By Mariana Enriquez December 11, 2016 It's harder to breathe in the humid north, up there so close to Brazil and Paraguay, the rushing river guarded by mosquito sentinels and a sky that can. I had opened by complimenting this cocktail of politics and cult horror in her work. And it definitely shouldnt be swelling. Ana Gallegos Cuiasis full professor in the Department of Spanish Literature of the University of Granada. I was reporting as a journalist, and I hated them. Vitcavage: What are some of the difficulties or obstacles you encounter while writing a shortstory? Or, even better: what makes readers become addicted to her poetics? Ive been wanting to read more weird fiction in translation, so was excited to pick up Mariana Enriquezs Things We Lost in the Fire. That being said, the plot that offers the most radical feminist reading is, without a doubt, Things We Lost in the Fire. The motivation behind the story is a series of femicides whose victims are burned with alcohol, which leads a group of burning women to set their own bodies alight, subverting beauty standards and fighting back against the discipline imposed upon their bodies by patriarchal society: they are no longer burnt up by men, but rather by themselves. The boy opens the door; she goes in. He leaves her alone, and she makes her way on foot to what is considered the most polluted river in the world. The driver makes her walk the last 300 meters; the dead boys lawyer wont come at all. She is currently Principal Investigator of theI+D LETRAL project, director of the "Ider-Lab" Scientific Unit of Excellence: Criticism, Languages, and Cultures in Iberoamerica, and Vice Dean of Culture and Research of the Department of Philosophy and Letters of the University of Granada. Marina Pinat, Buenos Aires DA, isnt thrilled with the smug cop sitting in her office. When Marina investigates, events grow more and more disturbing in a way that feels Lovecraftian. Enriquez places feminisms struggle against capitalism in the foreground, given the impossibility of gender equality without class equality, through a gothic that opens up to more complex interpretations, in which women and marginalized classes, rendered ghostly, become dangerous harbingers of horror, even while being the most vulnerable and castigated subjects under capitalism. The Degenerate Dutch: The rivers pollution causes birth defects. But they project bravery as well as outrage at the awful muck theyve dipped into. But I saw these 30,000 girls screaming all the time. These women have a choice in what they notice and what they flinch away from. And the church is no longer a church. "[4] Jennifer Szalai, writing in The New York Times, wrote "[Enriquez] is after a truth more profound, and more disturbing, than whatever the strict dictates of realism will allow. And Im always writing stories, theyre like my escape. Vitcavage: What can readers learn about Argentina from yourstories? In "Angelita Unearthed," the eponymous infant wears its feet down to the "little white bones" as it follows the narrator into an . For some reason that river to me always hid something very ancient, very evil, suggests Enriquez, a cosmic evil. In others, "Adela's House" and "An Invocation of the Big-Earred Runt," past crimes reach out from the past to claim new victims. Hes emaciated, dirty, his hair overgrown and greasy. Does it have a role to play? Shes trying to get a glimpse when the thing moves, and its gray arm falls over the side. Normally theres music, motorcycles, sizzling grills, people talking. In the slum Buenos Aires frays into abandoned storefronts, and an oil-filled river decomposes into dangerous and deliberate putrescence.. 2023 Macmillan | All stories, art, and posts are the copyright of their respective authors, Shadow Over Argentina: Mariana Enriquezs Under the Black Water. The church has been painted yellow, decorated with a crown of flowers, and the walls are covered with graffiti: YAINGNGAHYOGSOTHOTHHEELGEBFAITHRODOG. As it is, the cows head, and the yellowtainted cross and flowers, dont promise a happy relationship, regardless of who worships what. The full schedule can be found hereand the marginalia can be found here. In effect, Enriquezs short fiction is populated by women suppressed by patriarchal necropolitics: lesbian teenagers (The Inn), girls both sexual and cruel (The Intoxicated Years), sufferers of anorexia (No Flesh over Our Bones), self-mutilated schoolgirls (End of Term), women who are raped, satanic, etc. A woman, in this case from Argentina, who writes strange, unsettling horror stories, starting from a political and aesthetic commitment that has had such an international repercussion that it brings to mind the Latin American Boom, in feminist and terrifying form. things we lost in the fire mariana enriquez analysis She learns that strange things, including a dead man coming up out of the water, are happening in the slums. The journalist and author fills the dozen stories with compelling figures in haunting stories that evaluate inequality, violence, and corruption. Hes in Villa Moreno. An outsider comes in to investigate, and ultimately flees a danger never made fully clear. I will concentrate on two books of short stories by Enriquez, Los peligros de fumar en la cama [The dangers of smoking in bed] (2009) and Things We Lost In the Fire (2016), in order to explain the singularity of her fiction, which we might synthesize in the militant use of the gothic, permeated by feminism and necropolitics. Its been pointed out to me a lot, she replies. Meanwhile, in his house, the dead man waits dreaming. So what is prisoned under the river? I dont have a problem about being called a horror writer, she answers directly when I ask. The cows head, clearly, is just some of the neighborhood drug dealers trying to intimidate the priest. In my opinion, this was the finest moment in the collection and a powerful commentary on the violence and discrimination against the ones who live in the margins of a troubled . Even so, the genre was almost completely pushed to the margins of the canon, considered minor and a colonial imposition. Instead theres a wooden pool topped with a freshly slaughtered cows head. You have no idea what goes on there. Enriquez: A very long and complex novel, but I cant tell you more than that. The priest refers to them as retards, but the narrative itself isnt doing much better. Yeah, skip continents, and the tainted roots of horror will still get you. Sat 1 Oct 2022 13.00 EDT M ariana Enrquez, 48, lives in Buenos Aires. [Scheduled] South American: Things We Lost in the Fire, by Mariana What is the relationship like in Argentina between politics and literature? Anne M. Pillsworths short storyThe Madonna of the Abattoir appears on Tor.com. The driver makes her walk the last 300 meters; the dead boys lawyer wont come at all. After a few pages of that, walking corpses and abomination-imprisoning oil slicks just seem like a logical extension. In the end, one of the young boys drowned in the river. Not one of the blind kids with misshapen hands gets characterization, or even a speaking role other than to mouth platitudes about dead things dreaming. They physically abused them and threw them in the Riachuelo River. Her narrators have to shrug past almost unbearable sights as part of their everyday routines. I would say that my socio-political commentary comes more from my experience as a citizen than it does from my career as a journalist. Under the Black Water: A nightmarish story of a woman who tries to find the murderer of a teenage boy, a slum city full of violence and death, and the cult of the dead.
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