Mariana Enríquez, 48, lives in Buenos Aires. She is the author of nine books, including two short story collections, The Dangers of Smoking in Bed and Things We Lost in the Fire, both translated from Spanish by Megan McDowell. In 2019 Enríquez won Spain’s Premio Herralde, previously awarded to Javier Marías and Roberto Bolaño, for Our Share of Night, her first novel to be translated into English, also by McDowell. It follows a father and son whose ability to commune with the dead draws them into a bloodthirsty cult in junta-era Argentina. Kazuo Ishiguro wrote last year that the “beautiful, horrible world” of Enríquez’s writing “is the most exciting discovery I’ve made in fiction for some time”.
What attracts you to the genre of horror?
It’s very difficult to write about Argentina using only realism. In the 50s and 60s there was a strong tradition of fantastical fiction here: Borges, Silvina Ocampo, Julio Cortázar. Then the whole region became politicised with the dictatorship [1976-1983], the consequences of the Cuban revolution and the intervention of America. That led to the Sartrean dilemma of literature that has to be political and speak about the times, but of course Sartre never said literature had to be realistic, only that it had to be involved with what was going on. I think what happened to people like me who grew up in the 80s and 90s is that slasher movies, Stephen King and Twin Peaks all got mixed with our reality, which was already full of the language of horror: the disappeared, the children of the dead, children of the lost generation…
Do those real-life atrocities justify your more graphic scenes?
I don’t think there’s any need for moral justification but those things did happen here. Women had children in captivity and the children were stolen. They were torturing people next door to your house. They threw bodies into the ocean. I understand the [notion of] respect but I don’t want to be complicit in any kind of silence; to be timid about horrifying things is dangerous too. Maybe I turn up the volume to 11 because of the genre I like to work in, but the genre puts a light on the real horror that gets lost in [a phrase like] “political violence”.
