Author of web-comics, graphic short stories and novels, he has lately popularized the documentary style to relate the recent history, Alberto Chimals Twitter novel, Ciudad X: Novela en 101 Tuits, was originally published on Twitter on October 10, 2014, and subsequently in print version a year later, along with another, University of Oklahoma Instead theres a wooden pool topped with a freshly slaughtered cows head. The pollution, holding down whatever lies under the river, shapes the community, its children, its resentment, until they burst forth into something that will stir the river and release what lies beneath. Oh come, Emanuel? Not one of the blind kids with misshapen hands gets characterization, or even a speaking role other than to mouth platitudes about dead things dreaming. Before she can react, he shoots himself. It was something biblical. Enriquez places feminisms struggle against capitalism in the foreground, given the impossibility of gender equality without class equality, through a gothic that opens up to more complex interpretations, in which women and marginalized classes, rendered ghostly, become dangerous harbingers of horror, even while being the most vulnerable and castigated subjects under capitalism. Among the children marked by the black water, she thinks she spots the cop, violating his house arrest. Adam Vitcavage: This short story collection has a lot of reoccurring themes related to the horrific and the mysterious. Also hes very, very drunk. How can the well-known and familiar become strange and dangerous? The rivers dead, unable to breathe. He hasnt brought a lawyerafter all, he says, hes innocent. Under the Black Water: A nightmarish story of a woman who tries to find the murderer of a teenage boy, a slum city full of violence and death, and the cult of the dead. The full schedule can be found hereand the marginalia can be found here. The church has been painted yellow, decorated with a crown of flowers, and the walls are covered with graffiti: YAINGNGAHYOGSOTHOTHHEELGEBFAITHRODOG. These stories blend the real-life horrors of domestic and state violence, homelessness and economic uncertainty with the supernatural; ghosts, demons and witchcraft. You can be afraid of a monster and fear can also turn you into a monster. The river itself has been the chosen dumping site for waste from cow offal up through the tanners heavy metals. Subscribe toTheKenyon Reviewand every issue will be delivered to your door and your device! In the specific case of the River Plate tradition, there are important precursors such as Quiroga, Cortzar (who even wrote the famous Notas sobre lo gtico en el Ro de la Plata [Notes on the gothic in the Ro de la Plata]), Onetti, Felisberto Hernndez, Silvina Ocampo, and Alejandra Pizarnik. But hes not getting out, and neither is she. How do they affect women? I adopt this term from Achille Mbembe, who uses it to define the way in which states regulate death in the Third World (femicides, the sex trade, disappearances, kidnappings, drug trafficking, etc.). Shadow Over Argentina: Mariana Enriquezs Under the Black Water. Our mission is to amplify the power of storytelling with digital innovation, and to ensure that literature remains a vibrant presence in popular culture by supporting writers, embracing new technologies, and building community to broaden the audience for literature. I write for myself, thinking about my country and its reality.. A very good Sunday morning talk, suggests Mariana, and sounds like she means it. But hes not getting out, and neither is she. So we share interests then? Its refreshing to encounter somebody so political and literary who, instead of turning from genre, adopts it to save her work falling into preaching or pamphleteering. As it is, the cows head, and the yellowtainted cross and flowers, dont promise a happy relationship, regardless of who worships what. Thus the act of looking takes on enormous importance. Hes in Villa Moreno. Vitcavage: What are some of the difficulties or obstacles you encounter while writing a shortstory? Emanuel means god is with us. But what god? These rudderless, narcotically charged delinquents cast dark shadows in the nations flickering light: I walked slowly over to him and tried to imitate the look of hatred in the eyes of the girl in Parque Pereyra. It was like, whats the power that these girls are conjuring?. Pinats dubious about all this, or wants to be. Does our apathy make us complicit? In this case rather than Lovecrafts racism and terror of mental illness, we get ableism and a fun-sized dose of fat-phobia. A line of people playing the same loud snare drums as in the murga, led by deformed children with their skinny arms and mollusk fingers, followed by women, most of them fat . I like dark themes, and I would say that its my way of looking atthings. 2023 Macmillan | All stories, art, and posts are the copyright of their respective authors, Shadow Over Argentina: Mariana Enriquezs Under the Black Water. And the church is no longer a church. We are not currently open for submissions. 208 pages. Novel, short story collection, a long investigative non-fiction book? These women have a choice in what they notice and what they flinch away from. (Its the most remarkable word weve ever seen.) The proximity of others without these basic amenities creates a fragility in the better-off. Turning to Latin American literature, we observe that the gothic has borne relatively little fruit, often considered a subgenre within the fantastic, science fiction, or magical realism (see Brescia, Negroni, Braham, Dez Cobo, Casanova-Vizcano, and Ordiz). Under the Black Water isnt quite a Shadow Over Innsmouth retelling, but it riffs on the same tune. The driver makes her walk the last 300 meters; the dead boys lawyer wont come at all. Fear is one of the most powerful and motivating emotions. By Mariana Enriquez December 11, 2016 It's harder to breathe in the humid north, up there so close to Brazil and Paraguay, the rushing river guarded by mosquito sentinels and a sky that can. The "propulsive and mesmerizing" (The New York Times) story collection by the International Booker-shortlisted author of The Dangers of Smoking in Bed and Our Share of Nightnow with a new short story.The short stories of Mariana Enriquez are: "The most exciting discovery I've made in fiction for some time."Kazuo Ishiguro Among them all, Mariana Enriquez stands out with her own flickering light. But then, that sort of thing happens a lot in the Villa Moreno slum, and convictions are few. You have no idea what goes on there. Powered by WordPress and hosted by Pressable. After a few pages of that, walking corpses and abomination-imprisoning oil slicks just seem like a logical extension. Its stench, he said, was caused by its lack of oxygen. Normally there are people. Then, when I was a bit older, 8 or 9, this was the time when the crimes of the dictatorship came [to public knowledge]. But it would not be until the start of the twenty-first century that this new reading would attain global success thanks to TV series, comics, and bestsellers like Millennium, Twilight, Game of Thrones, The Walking Dead, Stranger Things, and many more, which have filled our imaginations with monsters, zombies, vampires, mutants, ghosts, cyborgs, and other supernatural beings that coexist with us in a sort of global-gothic world. He came out of the water. To what extent do neoliberal politics bring about the appalling precarity of social classes and individuals? We dont know what the awful spectre is, gray and dripping, that sits on the bed with its bloody teeth. About Things We Lost in the Fire. Im a cultural journalist. Site designed in collaboration with CMYK. Later on, the ideas of Evil and the dead river become an homage to Lovecraft and his unpublished works, mixed with my interpretations of Laird Barron. And death, how much is death worth? Enriquez: I dont know. In his house, says the boy, the dead man waits dreaming. The priest is furious, and furious with Pinat for being stupid enough to come. Do all lives have the same worth? What youre doing is basically reporting I dont think [journalism] can make you think in the long term or a very profound way, something you can go back to in 20 years and say, 'this is what was going on, this is the space people were living in.'. An emaciated, nude boy lies chained in a neighbors courtyard. But now he knows: they were trying to cover something up, keep it from getting out. In one story, "Under the Black Water," a severely polluted river that has become a dumping ground for victims of police violence becomes a source of a zombie cult. Dont you hear them? For years, he says, he thought the rotted river a sign of ineptitude. Im still intrigued by the idea of pollution as a messed-up attempt at bindingcontaining, of course, the seeds of its own destruction. Welcome to the discussion of Under the Black Water, the 10th story from Mariana Enrquez's Things We Lost in the Fire short story collection. Mariana Enriquez (Buenos Aires, 1973) has published novelsincluding Our Share of Night, which won the famous Premio Herraldeand the short story collections Dangers of Smoking in Bed and Things We Lost in the Fire, which sold to 20 international publishers before it was even published in Spanish and won the Premio Enriquez wants to tell us about poverty, gentrification and a crippling economy, but first and foremost - she wants to scare the shit out of us, and does it marvelously. [2] "Spiderweb" appeared in The New Yorker. Wed Jul 11, 2018 2:00pm. I had opened by complimenting this cocktail of politics and cult horror in her work. There are hints of sacrifice, mysterious deaths of the young. Isolated locals take dubious actions around a nearby body of water, resulting in children born wrong. A new and suspicious religion drives Christianity from the community. Just a while ago an English work of Antonio Di Benedetto was recovered. Yamil Corvalns body has already washed up, a kilometer from the bridge. angelita" [The little angel's disinterment], . In effect, Enriquezs short fiction is populated by women suppressed by patriarchal necropolitics: lesbian teenagers (The Inn), girls both sexual and cruel (The Intoxicated Years), sufferers of anorexia (No Flesh over Our Bones), self-mutilated schoolgirls (End of Term), women who are raped, satanic, etc. Things We Lost in the Fire: Stories (Spanish: Las cosas que perdimos en el fuego) is a short story collection by Mariana Enriquez. Whats Cyclopean: This is very much a place-as-character story. They learned how to swim. The time stamp suggests that he at least knew that two young men were thrown into the Ricachuelo River. This type of story-action creates enlightened, involved readers, and this, in my view, makes her fiction necessary. I interviewed Enriquez via email; I wrote to her in English and she responded in Spanish, with Jill Swanson then translating. So, the articulation of a univocal female community is an aporia becauseas if positioned within a materialist feminismthe problem of class permeates the problems of women, preventing a true sisterhood, as is illustrated in La Virgen de la tosquera [The virgin of the pit], a story in which bourgeois teenage girls seem to fight over a man when what is really at stake is class struggle: the war against his girlfriend, Silvia, a vulgar, common, dark-skinned girl. After the cop leaves, a pregnant teenager comes in, demanding a reward for information about Emanuel. Its not that her protagonists fear a slide into poverty, but that the niceness of their lives is so clearly perched on evil filth. The church has been painted yellow, decorated with a crown of flowers, and the walls are covered with graffiti: YAINGNGAHYOGSOTHOTHHEELGEBFAITHRODOG. There are hints of sacrifice, mysterious deaths of the young. Eventually, still unable to reach anyone, she tries to find her way to Father Franciscos church. Silvia was the one who came up with the idea of the quarry pools that summer, and we had to hand it to her, it was a really good idea. He tried to swim through the black grease that covers the river, holds it calm and dead. He drowned when he could no longer move his arms. Her absence is absolutely not due to nefarious extraterrestrial body-snatching, we promise. Argentinean literature, especially whats been written within the last forty years, after the dictatorship, is profoundly political. From where?, The most disturbing element to this is its source material, like much of Enriquez, drawn from news headlines. In the distance, she hears drums. Well, maybe not always that last. Yeah, yeah. Up next is u/Joinedformyhubs with the penultimate story in the collection, Green Red Orange, on Wednesday, December 21. The Degenerate Dutch: The rivers pollution causes birth defects. Translation: Under the Black Water [English] (2017) El chico sucio (2016) also appeared as: Translation: The Dirty Kid [English] (2017) The children born with those defects are, alas, treated more as symbols than characters, or as indications that the river leaches humanity. 202 pages. Copyright 2023 Kenyon Review. While chatting with the Argentine author, Im nave enough to bring this point up. Or, even better: what makes readers become addicted to her poetics? Seven Stories About Scary (and Possibly Sentient) Plants, What We Do for Wraithlike Bodies: Hilary Mantels, Five Space Books to Send a Chill Down Your Spine, Five Cautionary SF Tales About Enhanced Intelligence, A Critical Division of Starfleet Intelligence: Section 31 and the Normalization of the Security State. She dreamed that when the boy emerged from the water and shook off the muck, the fingers fell off his hands.. A few years ago in Buenos Aires, two policemen detained two poor, young men who were coming back from a night club. Shes relievedobviously, everyone has just gone to practice the murga for carnival, or already started to celebrate a little early. Not the only one but that I can assure you; that was weird. The slum spreads along the black river, to the limits of vision. But Pinat does, and doesnt try to investigate the slum from her desk like some of her colleagues. He leaves her alone, and she makes her way on foot to what is considered the most polluted river in the world. Cookie Notice [2] " Spiderweb" appeared in The New Yorker. He wouldnt touch politics, or football. They open the door, open the cabinet, cross the wall. The setting in the troubled wake of the Argentine dictatorship makes their underlying influence seem obvious, but sometimes the origins of horror can surprise you. What is the price of a body? This type of phenomenaI can find no better word to describe itis ever less frequent in world literature. Patricia Grodd Poetry Prize for Young Writers. 780 Van Vleet Oval Its one thing to mistreat and scare a young man, but its a very different thing to throw him into that hellishriver. I felt unpleasant echoes of That Only a Mother, a much-reprinted golden age SF story in which the shocking twist at the end is that the otherwise precocious baby hasnt got any limbs (and, unintentionally, that the society in question hasnt got a clue about prosthetics). Enriquez: Sure, for example, Under the Black Water was inspired by a true story of police violence. Normally there are people. You have to get out of here, Pinat tells him. That is to sayI primarily write thinking about Argentina, and in a larger context about Latin America, because we share many similar realities. I also draw inspiration from Alan Moore and his idea of evil as a form of social hygiene in the context of inequality and institutionalized violence. Today we're reading Mariana Enriquez's "Under the Black Water," first published in English in Things We Lost in the Fire, translated by Megan McDowel. Instead we get deformed children with their skinny arms and mollusk fingers, followed by women, most of them fat, their bodies disfigured by a diet based on carbs.. In the end, one of the young boys drowned in the river. Vitcavage: Since youre a journalist as well, is there a sense of need when it comes to including political commentary within yourfiction? And of course, whatever lies beneath the river might have been less malevolent, if it hadnt spent all that time bathing its ectoplasm in toxic sludge. The cows head, clearly, is just some of the neighborhood drug dealers trying to intimidate the priest. I dont have a problem about being called a horror writer, she answers directly when I ask. He tried to swim through the black grease that covers the river, holds it calm and dead. He drowned when he could no longer move his arms. Botting, Ellis, Patrick, Stevens, Williams, Gross, Mighall, Punter, and Byron, among others). Tens of thousands were tortured, killed, or disappeared under circumstances later nullified with a blanket amnesty. Enriquez: A very long and complex novel, but I cant tell you more than that. The protagonists in Enriquezs stories are mostly aware of their privilege, if its a privilege to have a place to live, food to eat, a face thats not grotesquely disfigured. Her father, who once worked on a River Barge, told stories of the water running red. The consequences are dire, but theres nevertheless a sense of agency in directing ones gaze. Now we burn ourselves. Argentina is a theme and a character in my stories. Mariana Enriquez mesmerizing short story collection, Things We Lost in the Fire, is filled with vibrant depictions of her native Argentina, mostly Buenos Aires, as well as some ventures to surrounding countries. I swear we dont keep picking stories with shootings and killer cops deliberately. The police brutality, I think yeah, if you have to choose something as an echo of that [the dictatorship]. She recognizes that little yellow house, so shes not lost. The Writing Life in Argentina in the 1990s, Kelly Link Makes Fairy Tales Even Weirder Than You Remember, When Reality is More Terrifying Than Cursed Bunnies, Booktails from the Potions Library, with Mixologist Lindsay Merbaum.
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