“A sunny place for gloomy people”, by Mariana Enriquez: seductive stories about everyday evil

In April 2020, when Argentina was locked up at home, Mariana Enriquez complained about the insistence of some media outlets to publish the opinion of literary people about the pandemic.

A little annoyed, she rejected comparisons of the health situation with her most dystopian stories and she repeated that the writer's responsibility is neither to resolve the present nor to save anyone with cheap metaphors.

Meanwhile, she took advantage of the confinement to do what she is good at and from there came

A sunny place for gloomy people

.

With an obese woman who has sex with spirits, another who lives against her will with a ghostly stranger who suffers from cancer or another who journalistically pursues a dark local legend, Enriquez returns to the short story and expresses the impossibility of escaping the context and one same.

Every time an image or fact tends to a moral conclusion, Enriquez flees violently and truncates expectations.

The best thing about Mariana Enriquez has always been the balance with which she plays with different codes, often opposite.

Her stories constantly move from the marginal to the official story;

They rely on mechanisms from genre literature to draw social and historical portraits;

Her writing is lyrical but also sober and sometimes even biting.

Both in a novel as monumental as

Our Part of the Night

As in the shorter ones, in the essays and in the stories, Enriquez manages to seduce - and has done so many readers in many languages ​​- thanks to the calculated mystery.

Every time an image or fact tends to a moral conclusion, it flees violently and truncates expectations.

And thanks to this she manages, from terror and fantasy, to investigate the evil that emerges in everyday life or that which drags down Argentine political history without touching common ground.

Perhaps due to pandemic inspiration, there is silence and death in the stories of

A Sunny Place for Bleak People

.

In the first of all, a woman tries to heal the spirits of a Buenos Aires suburb.

In another, a couple visits a sumptuous building that had been a place of torture during the dictatorship, a summer home for the rich and a teaching center.

In the stillness of all these places the darkness emerges to which we turn our faces based on sophisticated slogans and opinion articles.

And, as usual with Enriquez, also layers and layers of references.

Each of the stories is preceded by an epigraph that encapsulates the theme but also gives clues to the writers, musicians, artists—Mildred Burton, Cormac McCarthy, Jack Kerouac, Lydia Davis—and legends on whom Enriquez bases his work.

'The misfortune on the face', in which a woman suffers paralysis and then progressive blurring of her face, is inspired by an intervention by the artist Carmen Burguess (a friend of the writer and to whom the story is dedicated) on the covers of the

Seventeen

women's fashion magazine

.

Uncertainty, the deterioration of the body and the inability of a country to bury its ghosts lead to a spectral coexistence

This story is not the only one that focuses on the degradation of the body, who knows if it is another pandemic effect.

Mariana Enriquez has always had a special fixation on teenage protagonists, but now she is also the protagonist of female maturity: “They don't tell you, they don't warn you.

It infuriates me.

The skin dries out, fat accumulates on the hips and legs and belly, cellulite increases from one day to the next, that dead hair that is gray hair is impossible to tame," says the protagonist of 'Metamorfosis' , which implants its own fibroid to keep the body “under the skin.”

Stories like this confirm that terror always approaches a time and place obliquely, and it seems that there is less and less difference between the dead and the living in Enriquez's world.

That the uncertainty of the future, the dispossession of the body and the inability of a country to bury its ghosts lead to a certain spectral coexistence.

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