Set in the decades during and after Argentina’s military dictatorship, this occult treatment of the ‘***** war’ fuses political allegory and gleeful gore
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.
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.
‘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.
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