Buddy read for November: Mariana Enriquez's Things We Lost in the Fire

[Bill]

After Marie-Therese and I mumbled about our enthusiasm for Things We Lost in the Fire, it seems Randolph has kindly elevated it to a Buddy Read for November. So here's a belated discussion thread.

Mariana Enríquez is based in Argentina; this is her debut collection in English. Mary Vensel White shares our enthusiasm in The Rumpus [minor spoilers, argh]:
http://therumpus.net/2017/03/things-w...

I think there are parallels in approach with Guillermo Del Toro's best films, which I love. As in Del Toro's work, there are powerful resonances between the real historical background events, and the specific narratives in Enriquez's stories. In her case, this is Argentina's relatively recent troubled history of dictatorship, oppression, and economic crises.

More later on individual stories. I have to say I've found most of them to be very worthwhile, even the ones that I consider flawed.

[Bill]

Randolph wrote: "I just watched Cronos for the first time last night."
What did you think? It's probably my favorite Del Toro. So beautiful.

[Marie-Therese]

As Bill knows, I just loved this book. It's probably going to be my top pick for 2017.

I think what impressed me most was the freshness of Enríquez' voice. She draws on many different writers and genres (or, perhaps, I should say, she's informed by them in the way any educated writer would be), but she has a way of expressing her ideas and concerns (her femininity, individuality, and place in time) in a unique way. She's pretty fearless (she's an Argentine writing openly about the atrocities that have plagued her nation throughout her lifetime) while being aware of her privileged position as an upper-class educated woman (all right there in the very first story to jawdropping effect).

Enríquez reminds me sometimes of two of my favourite contemporary Mexican writers, Guadalupe Nettel and Valeria Luiselli, but I think she's more immediately politically engaged and also more steeped in a certain kind of genre horror-tinged view of the world. Her narratives aren't just dark, but really weird, too. Bill brings up Guillermo del Toro and that seems fitting. From 'Adela's House' near the beginning of the collection to 'The Neighbor's Courtyard' near the end, old-fashioned horror tropes wedded to the reality of historical atrocity give the stories body, fill them out and up, and make them hard to forget or ignore. Enríquez forces one to see these atrocities as being committed by real people doing real things but the telling has the weight of a ghost story or a fable.

[Bill]

Thanks for the detailed review, Marie-Therese!

"Adela's House" is one of my favorites. The teens are beautifully drawn, and I loved the open ending. The small, disturbing glimpses and hints in "The Neighbor's Courtyard" build up a momentum that just swept me to the end. I have to say I'd have preferred the ending to be more ambiguous, and not so explicitly horror-driven.

The first story, "The Dirty Kid", immediately impressed me with its engagement with economic realities, and how they were woven into the dark fiction narrative. Reminds me a little of Gabriel Blackwell's impressive The Natural Dissolution of Fleeting-Improvised Men (ignore the blurb, it's quite irrelevant).