It is difficult not to notice that Mariana Enríquez (Buenos Aires, 1973) is in the city. Her face is present on many of the advertising posts in Barcelona. “She makes me very ashamed,” the author herself admits shortly after taking some photographs in her publishing house. Her display of her new book of short stories, A Sunny Place for Bleak People (Anagrama), is more typical of a rock concert than a literary launch. “But welcome. The point is to talk about books,” she smiles.
The Argentine writer has always been in favor of narrating the most everyday horror and this time she has made no exception. She is very aware that only in this way can the reader feel his skin crawl when she reads one of her stories, because it is easy for him to feel identified. It talks about rape, the danger in marginal neighborhoods, and the not so marginal ones, express kidnappings, pain… also about ghosts, but not the ones that appear in Hollywood movies, since it flees from “supernatural bodies.” intervened”, but of beings that are nothing more than “a metaphor for memory, trauma and guilt.” Harmless, in any case, because… “what’s scarier, a ghost or a dying woman?”, she asks herself.
Esotericism is present, “as it is in today’s society,” and includes, among other examples, Conan, the deceased dog of the Argentine president, Javier Milei, whom he has cloned four times. “She communicates with him through a medium,” recalls the author, who insists that this is not a mere “argentinian.” “The first time I heard about a dog medium was in Barcelona. A friend wanted to know about her deceased dog and she contacted one.
The discomforts that the book can awaken in the reader do not come only from ghosts. Families, apparently solid structures, and the “disastrous” bonds that are unleashed in them, “cause more chills and give rise to terror. They have to be supported, no one really knows why. If you fight with a friend or a partner, you put it aside and that’s it. But what are you doing with your mother? This causes tensions to increase. And all because we force ourselves to make relationships more emotional.”
Its protagonists, in addition to carrying, for the most part, a heavy mental backpack, make efforts to cope as best they can with their hurt and dying bodies. “When the body fails, it is very scary.” One of them has cancer; another, she is nothing more than a girl who sees how her body rots, although, surely, what hurts her the most are the incriminating looks of her own grandmother; Her sister, on the other hand, suffers hallucinations and forgets to eat, while the protagonist of another story eats so much that she harms herself.
The terror of the dictatorship and its shock waves are also felt in his stories, “and in the day-to-day life of the country,” in which politics creeps into most daily conversations. In the story The Hymns of the Hyenas, for example, a castle is described that still exists in La Pampa, Argentina, and that “in its day, it was a concentration camp. Nowadays it is surprising because people go there to have picnics. People live together in places that were terror, like in the Oscar-nominated film The Hot Spot. It is disturbing.” But living with the ghosts of the past is something to which the Argentine people are accustomed, who now choose to look at the present.
“When there is a political change, nobody knows what can happen. The people have always demonstrated, but it is true that now there may be more repression of the protest. And if the repressive response is strong, the level of conflict can be very high. Anyway, it’s not something that scares me. “We’re all pretty used to it.”
Although current events require it, he prefers to talk about politics as little as possible. “I don’t like to talk about Milei because, for anything you say, she is capable of quoting you and retweeting you. He had never seen a president do that. And it’s not because of him anymore. “You never know what an unbalanced voter can do.”
Despite this, he clarifies that, although violence exists, “it is not as normalized as in other Latin American countries,” although he does not rule out anything. “Anything can happen in Argentina right now. The country faced disaster after disaster. He ends up recovering, but he never gets up the same. There came a moment when it seemed like it was not going back up and that it became a plateau. “People voted for an extreme situation to see if the plateau would return.” Time will tell.
