Things We Lost in the Fire by Mariana Enríquez
Review of Things We Lost in the Fire by Mariana Enríquez, translated by Megan McDowell
“About the backyard, just as dry and dead as the front, full of little holes like the dens of rats. ”
Thing We Lost in the Fire: Stories by Mariana Enríquez (2017). Published in English by Hogarth Press.
Stumbled upon this book one day when I was crawling through Goodreads looking for women’s literature in translation. The last book I’d read by a Latino author was Cockfight, which was from Ecuador. I really liked that book and the themes it was portraying, as well as the cultural details I’d learned in it, so when I saw this was by an Argentine, I was even more curious. I’d never read anything from Argentina so this seemed like a solid choice for me to get my toes wet in that literature. Latin America absolutely fascinates me, and it is my dream to go to South America and experience the culture firsthand.
And I did indeed learn quite a bit from these short stories. They’re told in a vein similar to the American author Shirley Jackson, incorporating the supernatural and mythical in a way that’s filled with horror. The stories themselves tend to start off relatively mild, but as we dig deeper into the narrative flow and into the story, we begin to uncover the horrors that await our characters, often young women and girls.
I’ve said a lot already, so let’s dive into this review, shall we?
Book Blurb
In these wildly imaginative, devilishly daring tales of the macabre, internationally bestselling author Mariana Enriquez brings contemporary Argentina to vibrant life as a place where shocking inequality, violence, and corruption are the law of the land, while military dictatorship and legions of desaparecidos loom large in the collective memory. In these stories, reminiscent of Shirley Jackson and Julio Cortázar, three young friends distract themselves with drugs and pain in the midst a government-enforced blackout; a girl with nothing to lose steps into an abandoned house and never comes back out; to protest a viral form of domestic violence, a group of women set themselves on fire.
But alongside the black magic and disturbing disappearances, these stories are fueled by compassion for the frightened and the lost, ultimately bringing these characters—mothers and daughters, husbands and wives—into a surprisingly familiar reality. Written in hypnotic prose that gives grace to the grotesque, Things We Lost in the Fire is a powerful exploration of what happens when our darkest desires are left to roam unchecked, and signals the arrival of an astonishing and necessary voice in contemporary fiction.
Content
This is a collection of short stories, and, as I mentioned before, they tend to start off pretty normal, almost as if they’re about the everyday life we live in. The majority of the stories are set in Argentina, with one crossing over into Paraguay for a day trip that has gone wrong with the narrator’s cousin and dimwitted husband. But get deeper into the story, we find out how these worlds that Enriquez has created aren’t as normal as we think they are. People disappear, we have some imagery of individuals physically mutilating and cutting themselves with a switchblade, and there’s ghost stories that come true. But we find that these often happen towards the end of the stories, leaving the reader on a note of suspense. There’s seedy men, rape, drug abuse. They got everything in these stories.
I think from the very first short story, we get the tone of the collection almost immediately. In the first story, our main character is a privileged middle class Argentine living in her family’s home in a seedy neighborhood. There’s a lot of trans prostitutes in this area and homeless people, like a little boy and his drug addict mother. Our main character treats the boy to ice cream one day after finding him alone without his mother, but after that night the both disappear. But then, on the news, a report about a decapitated boy appears, leading our main character to spiral down as she thinks it’s the boy.
The context of Argentina’s political and economic status looms over every single one of these stories. For decades, Argentina has been under a political rule in which there was needless violence. Many people disappeared or were blatantly murdered. And that adds to the atmosphere of these stories even more, because this is the context they’re set in. While many of our narrators are blatantly middle to upper class, a good chunk of the stories are set in the 1990s, which is immediately after the time period in which the real-life horrors occurred. And it is here, in this book, we get a time capsule and history lesson on what it meant to be an Argentine during this time.
I think the writing of these stories in smaller vignettes versus longer short stories really works well for the prose. If they were longer, I don’t think the writing style would have worked as well, but because they are, the short-to-the-fact writing tends to convey the story in a clear, brusque manner. As if it’s a day to day routine, something normal to be experienced in this society they’re living in.
Overall Thoughts
It’s a wonderfully well-written collection, one that I would recommend for anyone to read. It’s not too long, clocking in at 208 pages, but the stories themselves aren’t too long. They tend to be quick reads, ones that are brisk, very to-the-point. I found it interesting the context of Argentina’s history, as well as the mix of horror elements. All in all, I think this is something that one should read if they want a lesson in short stories as a form of horror and social commentary mixed.
