A newspaper editor with years of editorial work said days ago that
the great literary successes are always explained with the Monday newspaper
.
Wizard children were before and will be after the
Harry Potter
saga .
Who would have thought that
Scandinavian police officers
would be so seductive?
No one in their right mind would have foreseen the event of
El infinito en un junco
, the doctoral thesis of the Spanish
Irene Vallejo Moreu
, published in 2019 and which has sold one million copies worldwide.
The Argentine Mariana Enriquez is the new black swan
in search of an explanation.
Mariana Enriquez, pictured last year.
Before winning the 37th Herralde Novel Prize with
Nuestra parte de noche
(2019), which
triggered its international projection
, Enriquez had what is defined as a work.
A work, moreover, of the most coherent and seductive, even for those who are not horror readers.
His first novel written when he was barely 21 years old,
Going Down is the worst
(1995), was followed by
How to completely disappear
(2004) and
This is the sea
(2017);
the tales of
The Dangers of Smoking in Bed
(2009) and
The Things We Lost in the Fire
(2016);
Someone walks on your grave.
My trips to cemeteries
(2013) and
The younger sister.
A portrait of Silvina Ocamp
o (2014), among other texts.
the power of the dark
But it was that dark Argentine story linked to the life of Juan and his son Gaspar, a book of
almost 700 pages
through which the
disappeared, powerful and unpunished families circulate, the power of desire and the dark
, which made its way throughout the world.
The Argentine writer Mariana Enríquez, in Avilés (Asturias) assures that living in permanent fear of economic and political crises "paradoxically helps to create horror stories" when writing about something that is well known.
EFE/ Alfredo Oliveros
For the newspaper
El País
, Enriquez's impact is
"overwhelming, global and unstoppable"
.
The New York Times
said
these days that Enriquez is like
a rock star
.
Few more appropriate definitions of success.
"Fear is one of the oldest and most powerful emotions of mankind, and
the oldest and most powerful fear is the fear of the unknown
," writes HP Lovecraft in his essay
Supernatural Horror in Literature
.
Enriquez herself
remembers the exact moment
when she read, at the age of 10,
Pet Cemetery
, by Stephen King: an uncle who was a bit clueless about children's readings had given it to her.
"Faced with a particularly brutal page,
I threw the book to the ground
. It is my most vivid, initiatory and definitive reading memory," the author has recounted.
Cover of "Our night part", by Mariana Enríquez.
Mariana Enriquez's stories, in addition to being particularly well written, portray a near horror (too much).
Anyone is frightened by a count fond of human blood who lives in Transylvania (where is Transylvania?), but
the darkness itself
, the one that lives in our neighborhoods, the one that voses, the one that knows the villas or takes the 152 to La Boca, that terrifies without limits.
On March 16, Mariana Enriquez
will read her own and others' horror stories
at the Teatro Coliseo.
The entries evaporated in a breath.
Because?
Perhaps because the dark times that fell upon us
become a little less gloomy
if we look at them reflected in a book.
Anyway, it is a hypothesis.
We will have to wait for Monday's newspaper.
look too
Simple ideas and fanaticism
look too
democratic breath
look too
Almudena Grandes and memory