The romantic and macabre fiction of Mariana Enríquez (Buenos Aires, 46 years), at once social and ghostly, has risen with the Herralde Novel, with a novel “monster”, Our share of night, which seeks, as the deity lovecraftiana that contains, devouring everything. To devour, in reality, all that obsessed its author, who has woven a work special in the history of Argentina becomes dark nightmare nourished by an intense gothic that owes both to On heroes and tombs, Ernesto Sabato, as to wuthering heights, by Emily Brönte, and the cursed poet Arthur Rimbaud. Not in vain are these the three things that the own Enríquez mentioned when asked what it’s made of his dark and addictive universe.
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“I don’t want to take the nightmares” Much more than terror
Our party night began as a narrative of four heads —the idea was to tell the same story from four points of view, or genres, different— and ended up converted into an organic creature of four voices —six, in reality, if you count the inserts narrated by a doctor “psychopath” and “the news story of the discovery of a mass grave in Argentina”, added the author’s—. In it, a father and his son travel the Argentina of the eighties road “to find a final folk-horror”; it becomes the story The house of Adela, which is included in things we lost in the fire, “one of the origins of the novel”; it tells of the creation of The Order, the cult of supernatural on the pivot of the novel, formed in the London psychedelic of the seventies, and detailing the sentimental education of a teenager in the Argentina of the nineties.
All this, perfectly spinning, gives rise to what the jury —formed by Lluís Morral, Gonzalo Pontón Gijón, Marta Sanz, Juan Pablo Villalobos and Silvia Sesé— has been considered a “total novel”, as ambitious and excessive “as 2666 by Roberto Bolaño”.
Overflow
“I have been delighted desbordarme,” admits Enríquez, who had not written a novel “since 2004”, since his work is basically made up of stories, and had always wanted to, “she adds, ” make a novel genre that contains a political reflection without that this would lead to straying from the genre”. In the novel, a world filled with many other worlds, John, the father, the protagonist, is able to visit parallel universes that can’t change, only observe, and that in reality they are ossuaries, cemeteries, and are only inhabited by the dead that aren’t even present. “All of that has to do with the early texts of terror that I read were texts that documented the torture of the seventies and the eighties,” he confesses.
The big bang of its realism romantic gothic (macabre, adds) the part of the two above-mentioned works — the classic Sabato starring “the figure beautiful and damned” by Alejandra“; and ” the woman intense” that gives voice to wuthering heights— and the verses of rebellious Rimbaud, the reading coincided in time with the end of the dictatorship in Argentina “and the publication of a series of journals in which he made an exposure pornographic” of what had just occurred in their country.
In the mind of the girl Enríquez —“I must have been 11 or 12 years old when all this happened, and I had everything at my fingertips, did not distinguish between reality and fiction because the reality was worse than any fiction I could imagine”, he says— all of the universe spookiness of literature was inevitably linked “to the horror real.” The monsters were on one side and the other, in all parties, ensures.
Six women in the 37 editions
It felt like yesterday Mariana Enríquez flattered because his book had been made with the Award Herralde Novel, the most important of all who gives his publisher, Anagrama. Created in 1983 and endowed with 18,000 euros, in addition to editing the work that will come out this month, the purpose of the award —who have received Enrique Vila-Matas, Roberto Bolaño or Alan Pauls, among others— is to promote literature written in Spanish. Last year was Cristina Morales for easy Read , —brand new National prize for Literature 2019—and Enríquez is the sixth author to achieve that feat. In this edition there has not been a finalist.
