Mariana Enriquez
says
that what terrifies us is usually always the same, for a long, long time. The haunted house, the living dead, ghosts in general. However, in his new book
A sunny place for gloomy people
(Anagrama), those expected places of the genre appear
displaced
: they are not "that" that scares but rather they are
that which inhabits us
and that, from within, subjugates us with dread. .
Enriquez is
a reference in horror literature
. The first batch of his new book has been on the streets for a month and has accumulated
seven editions in the world
(two in Argentina). His previous novel,
Nuestra parte de noche
(also by Anagrama),
has 34 editions in Latin America
. The Latin American authors who look at those numbers are counted on the fingers of half a hand.
The uniqueness of this Argentine, born in 1973 and who continues editing the pages of a Sunday supplement as if none of the above were real, is that she is
fully aware
that the most terrible thing does not come from the world of the dead but is right here. ,
in the world of the living
.
An undeserved beauty
Poverty, lack of interest in others, machismo, violence, oppression, fascism are tensions on which the stories of A Sunny Place for Dark People rest.
Enriquez looks at the world without mercy
and portrays it with a beauty that she does not deserve.
The
pandemic
, says the writer, was a watershed. She did not write during the months of confinement. She could barely think. So, when she sat down to give shape to these twelve stories, the trail of death and fear that
her covid had left slipped
between her lines.
The stories, thus, appear
populated by bodies that suffer
. Old bodies in "My sad dead", the story that opens the book and which stars
a doctor in her sixties
who can see the spirit of those who were murdered. In "The Birds of the Night", the protagonist says: "I have a disease whose main symptom is that
the skin rots
, as if it were dead."
There are other
diseases
: a woman
has her uterus removed
. "They also don't warn you, of course, that removing your uterus hurts until you cry and scream; it's routine, they repeat, routine, for you it's routine, insolent sadists," she writes in "Metamorfosis." The healthy makeup artist from "The Woman Who Suffers" is asked on WhatsApp about the
evolution of the cancer
that is killing her, but she has nothing to say about it. Doesn't she have anything?
There are also
possessed bodies
, like that of "Julie" and different
ghosts
who did not realize that the body they had died a while ago. We are the container we inhabit. And in it, in its future, infinite modes of terror also nest.