In 2017, Things We Lost in the Fire by Argentinian writer Mariana Enríquez introduced a compelling new voice to English readers. Tough-edged and tightly honed, her short stories inhabited the space between high gothic horror and cruel sociopolitical reality. At its best, her writing had a cool, brutal economy:
We moved. My brother still went crazy. He killed himself at twenty-two. I was the one who identified his ruined body … He didn’t leave a note. He told me his dreams were always about Adela. In his dreams, our friend didn’t have fingernails or teeth; she was bleeding from the mouth, her hands bled.
In Our Share of Night, her first novel translated into English, set in the decades during and after Argentina’s military dictatorship, Enríquez ditches the miniature and goes big. Shaping her style to the space, she allows it to go drastically slack:
The dog wasn’t by the fountain or the pool, so he started checking for her around the trees. There were a lot of them in the park, and Gaspar would have liked to be able to identify them, to know which was a poplar, which was a loquat; he only recognised the pines. He wished they taught that kind of thing at school, instead of about fractions or single-celled organisms. He did well in school because it was easy, but he got bored, he always had. He read on his own: his father could be erratic and he could be scary, but he let Gaspar read whatever he wanted.
It’s not just the bloat that dismays, it’s the aimlessness. This is a passage that doesn’t so much advance as expand – a shapeless, free-associative cloud.
Over the course of 736 pages, Our Share of Night takes this unstructured, direction-free wandering and makes of it a governing aesthetic. The plot is relatively straightforward. We meet Gaspar as a child in 1981, and follow him into early adulthood in 1997. His mother having died in suspicious circumstances, Gaspar grows up in the care of his dying father, Juan. Juan is a medium; his son has inherited his powers. Gaspar’s abilities make him useful to malign and politically powerful groups, but Juan is determined to protect him.
“Sometimes,” Enríquez writes, “it is hard to name the horror.” Perhaps this is a plaintive note to self; Enríquez rarely names things at all. Through a rite called the Rite, Juan channels a dark force called the Darkness. The Rite is presided over by a sinister order called the Order, who also control the place where the Rite must be performed – the Place of Power. What the Order don’t know is that the Place of Power isn’t the only powerful place. There’s also another place, called the Other Place.
Enríquez’s stubborn anti-invention soaks deep into her language. “Something was changing,” we’re told, “and the change was terrible and wonderful.” A garden is “lovely but sad”. A silence is “powerful and horrible”. “I have no doubt,” says Juan, “that there is something important and repulsive behind that door.” You have to really treasure your banalities to insist on serving them up in pairs.
Similes unfailingly miss their mark. Two men having sex are “like the pictures in the porn magazines, only moving”. Juan’s large hands when they punch someone are “like boxing gloves without the protection of the fabric and padding”, or to put it another way: they’re like hands.
Often undecided as to what she’s trying to convey, Enríquez hedges her bets. “The silence was total,” she tells us, “except for nocturnal birds, the lapping of the river, a dog barking in the distance.” Gaspar’s room “looked out on to the street, or rather the front yard”. A ghostly girl is “covered in trickles of blood or maybe strands of red yarn”. When her indecision reaches a peak, she gives up on sentence structure completely and dumps information in a heap, like old clothes at a jumble sale, hoping the reader can find what they want: someone’s hands and feet are “tied with the nylon cord that had been easy to buy without raising suspicion (‘It’s for a package, I need a good strong one’), yet was impossible to break without great effort or the use of a knife”.
‘He … tied his hands and feet with the nylon cord that had been easy to buy without raising suspicion (“It’s for a package, I need a good strong one”), yet was impossible to break without great effort or the use of a knife.
The translator, Megan McDowell, has handled all Enríquez’s previous books, but this time something is off. Is “an adult depression that collapsed him into bed” really flawless English? And what are we to think when we’re told, hilariously, that in the course of learning to cook, Gaspar “ventured painstakingly into a potato pie”?
Some might argue that a horror novel, as this aspires to be, should be judged less on the sophistication of its language and more on its ability to thrill. But the narrative is as loosely shaped as its sentences. Section one builds to the book’s best set piece: Juan summoning the Darkness in an orgy of holy violence. Here, as the ghosts of Argentina’s “dirty war” become ever more insistent, and occult power entrenches the ability of a privileged elite to torture and oppress, Enríquez’s fusion of political allegory and gleeful gore seems briefly to cohere. But she has blown her best ideas and discharged all narrative tension. For the remaining 500 pages, she is adrift, recycling the novel’s motifs, reworking her own past material, and damning her characters to maudlin stasis.
Enríquez isn’t alone in trying, through genre conventions, to revivify the big, ambitious literary novel. Karl Ove Knausgård attempted something similar in The Morning Star, and Hanya Yanagihara in To Paradise. The problem is that, like them, she seems to think that a commercial veneer obviates the need to invest language with life. The result is the worst of both worlds: neither thrills nor poetry, pace nor the pleasure of prose.
• Our Share of Night by Mariana Enríquez, translated by Megan McDowell, is published by Granta (£18.99). To support the Guardian and the Observer buy a copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
