An Interview with Mariana Enríquez

This interview was held as part of the Desperate Literature Prize for Short Fiction, open until April 30th. The aim of the Desperate Literature Short Fiction Prize is both to celebrate the best of new short fiction and to give winners the most visibility possible for their writing. Prizes include cash offerings, writing retreats, the opportunity to be published in multiple print and online journals, having work put in front of literary agents and a manuscript assessment.

Mariana Enríquez is one of the most spellbinding narrators in Latin American literature, and a judge for the 2023 prize.

Terry Craven: Hello! So it’s a real pleasure to be chatting with you today and such an honour that you’re judging our 2023 literary prize. You’re talking to us from Buenos Aires, correct? I ask because I was wondering if you do a lot of writing in places other than Buenos Aires, and if that sets the tone or flavour of how you’re writing?

Mariana Enríquez: Hello. Thank you very much for inviting me and doing this. So, I don’t really enjoy working when I’m travelling. Many people wonder what the life of a writer that travels is like. In my case, because I love cemeteries and I love art, it’s escaping to see some exhibition or some cemetery, some place, or if a band is there. It’s a lot of work, especially when it’s not your language. So to also write in that kind of environment, it’s just too much. It’s not really a creative environment to work. But it is a creative environment for me to get stories. To meet people. To have some weird kind of experience that maybe you only have in these kinds of places.

I need to be here, in some place I can call home, with my environment, with my books, with all this mess. I don’t like to work in places that I don’t feel my own.

[In Paris] I went to see some weird stuff, like they have some collections of automatons, which are very creepy. And there is the Museum of Gustave Moreau that was absolutely insane. But they’ve forgotten, the Parisians. It’s very strange. Because when I talk to them and they ask me, what are your influences in writing? And I say the symbolists. Rimbaud, Jean Lorrain, all the illustrators and Odilon Redon, that kind of symbolist era, you have to remind them. Nowadays there’s a lot of autofiction and they are very rational, but there’s an underbelly of absolute madness there that they kind of decided not to touch.

Yeah, that Moreau house is really amazing.

Your translator, Megan McDowell, in the back of Things We Lost in the Fire, writes, “Mariana Enríquez’s particular genius catches us off guard by how quickly we can slip from the familiar into a new and unknown horror. The wraiths of Argentina’s violent past appear in her stories, but ultimately Enríquez’s literature is not tied to any time or place. Rather, it appeals to ancient, creeping fears.” There is a lot of focus on Argentina, its history and the dictatorship that comes through the writing, especially in your novel, Our Share of Night. I wonder about this balance between getting to the universal through the particular and if you could just talk a little bit more about it.

In terms of literature, Argentina, for better or worse, has always been a country very influenced by foreign language literature. Why? Because mainly the people that could write and were literate were immigrants. And immigrants from Europe, even the poor immigrants, many of them were anarchists or dissidents. They were very well educated, so they would read Dostoyevsky and Mayakovsky and all that kind of stuff. Borges was absolutely fascinated with British literature. He was obsessed with Chesterton. So that is the canon. It’s a very hybrid, cosmopolitan literature and in a way it doesn’t have the locality, I find, that other literatures have. My family is from Galicia so it’s the north of Spain where there’s not a lot of sun. And then you have the people that are descended from indigenous folks that have been neglected for a long time. It’s that kind of thing that I think happens everywhere, but here it’s a very strange melting pot.

When we talk about space and where we are writing from it is difficult because that kind of looking to Europe is also very colonial to me. But at the same time, that’s the literature and the culture that I was raised in. I think you have to be honest about what your culture is, and if your culture is a bit obsessed with the foreign because it doesn’t think it’s good enough, that’s something that has to be in your writing. That’s an insecurity that I really like to touch.

But in the last years, the horror that we live is not just the horror of the dictatorship; for example, we just had this heat wave and some people went ten days without electricity in the city. This was hell. It is really a third world problem.

Talking quickly about Galicia, which has such a strong tradition of the strange, do you have any particular attachment to the mythology of the region?

No, it’s odd. My Galician grandmother, she was a communist. She didn’t like superstition. She was absolutely materialistic in the Marxist sense of the word. And so was my father. But from the side of my mum, who are an Italian family but they lived in the north of Argentina, where everything is mixed with Brazil and Paraguay and with all the mythology of the area, the stories came from there, not from Galicia.

Last year we had a chat with Ottessa Moshfegh just before Lapvona came out, and one of the questions I asked her was about violence or depravity in her work. And of course it’s something very prominent in your work and something you’ve spoken about a lot. In terms of the stories we get coming in [to the prize], we see a lot of violence being used as if it justifies a story in itself. I was wondering if you could talk a bit about your relationship with violence with regards to horror.

To me, it doesn’t really need justification because I still read my stuff and then I read the news and I find the news more horrific. And I think it’s the thing of thinking, “No, I don’t want to read about that,” “This triggers me,” “This makes me feel bad.” I think that’s a very easy way out, to read about what’s going on and to deny the things that happen. It’s a really easy way to go back to your little world where everything is alright. I am a journalist, too, but I don’t write about that, I write about culture and arts and stuff. But really, in my literature, I like to acknowledge these things that are not alright. And since I don’t do it with nonfiction, I do it with fantastic fiction and with horror. It’s the best language, in genre, to talk about these things.

Many of the things that I write about come from real events. So it’s not even that I invent the violence. There’s a story called “The Dirty Kid” that has a very meticulous and detailed description of a murder of a child, and I basically copied it from the media. There’s nothing I invented there at all. And people come to me and say, “How can you do that to a child?” And say I didn’t do anything to that child. That happened, but you forgot it because there was another child the next day, and another mess the next day. So the child was forgotten.

We’re living now in a time of a lot of judgement where you make a mistake and you’re over. And we can have violent thoughts, wrong thoughts, and then account for them and change our behaviour. I don’t think that’s a problem. But I think that it’s very Puritan to think that you have to live your life completely according to some set of rules. So sometimes when you read something that really is shocking, I think in a way there’s something in the reader that says, “But did I ever think something like that? Did I ever wish something like that to happen to someone? Do I not pay attention to this thing happening around me because I prefer to retreat to my safe space?” I mean, the words “safe space” together really creep me out. Because to me it’s not protecting or anything, but it’s the consummation of individualism. I go to my safe place and I’m safe there, and whatever happens to you, bye, you know?

Yeah, it made me think of another thing that Ottessa Moshfegh said about how she didn’t really see her characters as unlikable, but that she wanted to get in the character and just allow that to kind of go where it needed to go. Something else you’ve commented on before, in relation to the novel, is that sometimes writing inside the subjectivity of some of the more deplorable characters was kind of fun or interesting. But I think you used the word fun. [laughs]

Yeah, yeah, it was fun. It was really fun because in a way you are exaggerating things that are there. But there’s truth, too, at the end of it, at the core of it. I write a lot of unlikable people. I think all of us are unlikable in some aspects of our personality. I never wanted, as a reader, a character that you should empathise with or like. I want to understand what they do. I want them to have a reason. To me, when they don’t have a reason or a motive, that’s exploitative.

For example, Juan’s character in Our Share of Night has many reasons for his violence. One is that he wants to save his child, but another motivation— that is maybe not a nice motivation— is that he is jealous of that body. And I see that dynamic a lot in fathers and sons. Of course it doesn’t appear in the very violent ways that appear in the book, but he envies that body, and sometimes he wants to hurt it and he has the psychological power of doing it. He submits Gaspar to a lot of abuse, and why does Gaspar still love him? Well, because sometimes you love your abuser and that’s a very complex thing. It’s very simple and re-victimises the person to say, “How can you love your abuser?” You know, feelings are very complex and when your abuser is your father or the person you love or whatever, you choose to forgive them. You can find justifications and stuff like that. And the Order, they do very bad things. Their ultimate goal is to maintain their wealth and their power by keeping their conscience and their bodies. It makes sense, you know, not to give up, to go against nature. That’s the ultimate power. So, they have a motive, they have a reason, and I understand what they do, even if I don’t agree. That’s what I look for in fiction, not to like them. To like them is something that doesn’t have to do with storytelling, with it being with verisimilitude. But what I believe is motive. And getting the “why.”

I was going to ask you as well about research, because a lot of the novel Our Share of Night is set in northern Argentina but you said that you didn’t want to go back and do any research. You wanted it to be based on your imagination or your memory of it. And obviously with the internet now, anytime we’re researching anything, there’s a near infinite number of holes you can go down, but if you’re writing short fiction— and in the case of our story prize, it’s 2000 words— you really don’t have a place for this. I wondered if you could just tell us about the choice there.

I’m a journalist too, so I’m very used to digging too much. But Our Share of Night is not a historical novel, and the short fiction, they’re not historic, so I don’t care. And you wouldn’t notice because you don’t live in Buenos Aires, but in some of the short stories, I put the names of two streets and I say they’re straight, but they’re not, they’re actually perpendicular in real life. It doesn’t need a fact checker. It doesn’t matter. It’s just the names of two streets that happen in a world that is not this.

So that kind of sense of zeitgeist, to me, was more important than how some street really looked. [If the goal is] to not wake up the reader from the dream, you do it more with the zeitgeist of the era, more with an idea of the era, than with little details. Even in this story that I was telling you about, people that live in the city and that know these streets, very few noticed or cared about it because they bought the pact and they understood that this is fiction. To me, it works better because it gives that kind of dreamy, oneiric kind of thing, where you read something and it feels like a memory. And reality, when you think about it, feels more like a memory than otherwise, because that’s how you process reality, with little mistakes, let’s say. It’s like if I ask you, what were you wearing ten months ago, unless something very important happened to you ten months ago and you remember because of that, you have no idea. So you would invent it if you’re doing autofiction. That’s what fiction is to me.

I want to touch on the question of faith, or belief. I heard you say that as a child you took your Catholic faith very literally. You said that the moment that you gave up your belief was when you were told Jesus would speak to you and that didn’t happen.

Yeah, of course.

And then you said you currently don’t believe in anything. But reading your stories, I personally don’t want to believe that you don’t believe anything. And why is that? Because you know that Fox Mulder poster from X-Files, the one that says, “I want to believe”? I have it right above my bed. Because I don’t know if I believe, in whatever sense, in a lot of things, but I definitely know I want to believe. And I was wondering about your relationship to a belief in terms of the fantastic, in terms of horror, in terms of what you’re doing with the novel, how far does it go? Because your stories themselves make me want to believe, sometimes, to terrify me.

Yeah, I understand what you’re saying. I think what I wanted to say is that I’m not religious anymore. But I think I’m in the same space where I want to believe. I’m very open to things, I’m not dismissive of anything. I’m very open to the paranormal because what is real anyway? The problem for me is that I’ve seen it go very wrong, like spiritualistic things, magical things, people get very… especially in a Catholic country, because it’s very mixed with guilt, people can go very superstitious and think they’re doing things to them. And all that, I use it a lot in my fiction because it’s very damaging, too. I guess there’s a spiritual dimension.

If I believe in something, I believe in some kind of purpose. It’s the same as in fiction. So I have to believe in the purpose, not of us or our lives, but of this, that we share together, to mean something to someone.

I also have a few questions about short fiction. Last year, one of our readers, Emily Westmoreland, had a chat with translator and writer Anton Hur and they spoke about the fact that they felt that short fiction was harder to sell in the Anglophone world than it was in Korea. Have you seen anything like this with the movement of your writing into the Anglophone, Francophone, or any other sphere?

It’s very strange. In Britain, there wasn’t much of a difference between the reception of  the short stories and the novel. I think maybe the Booker had to do with that, but even with many of the novels in the Booker, I don’t even know the names; I forget about them completely. Yeah, it does give a push, but I believe less and less about those kinds of pushes. It’s two weeks and then move on to another thing.

In France, for example, it’s even stranger because they know even less what short fiction is than in the Anglophone world. I mean, the Anglophone world has the O’Henry Prize which has amazing,  very famous short story writers. I’m talking about the gods and goddesses to me, like Kelly Link, for example. There is a space for it, especially in genre because the fantastic and horror works very well in short stories. But in France, there’s nothing like that. The other day I was doing an interview and they were saying, “It’s very strange what’s happening with your short stories here, because people don’t read short stories.” In the language, they don’t even call it “short story”, they call it nouvelle.

I come from a tradition where most of the big writers are short story writers. Cortázar, Borges, Silvina Ocampo, you can go on. And even the novelists are “nouvellists” like Cesar Aida, for example, that might be the most famous Argentinian right now. His novels are very short. That is my tradition. So coming with a big thing like Our Share of Night is not very Argentinian. It’s a bit more like Latin America from Bolaño to García Márquez, how they have this very, very big narrative that we read a lot. Here short stories never have a problem.

But I don’t know what it is because you would think that something short that doesn’t need that much attention and you can read in the subway, it would be more sought after than a novel, but it’s not. I think it’s much more difficult to sell short stories, and maybe a writer that has a name has it easier with the short stories.

I think that what’s definitely emerging or establishing is the weird. It’s kind of amazing, especially in Spanish, how much the weird made a jump into something not completely respectable, but almost. And I can see it, too, happening in other languages, like for example a lot with women like Julie Armfield. I just ended Our Wives Under the Sea, for example. It has Lovecraftian elements, and it’s a love story, too, and it’s definitely very, very weird. I think this novel, twenty years ago, nobody would know what to do with this thing. She goes to the depths of the sea and then becomes an axolotl. I mean, it’s like, what? I just finished it and I was very happy that a young writer and a young woman like that has the freedom of publishing that novel and getting good reviews.

I think Ishiguro was one of the first writers to understand it, that you could have Remains of the Day and you could have Never Let Me Go. It’s not opposite. And I remember like fifteen years ago, for example, it was very difficult for me to find these softly weird things. And now it’s everywhere. I had to go to George Sanders in Tenth of December and stuff like that. His style is absolutely beautiful. But he had some sci-fi, some extremely weird stuff in his very mostly, let’s say, American kind of narrative. I remember Cormac McCarthy with The Road, which is almost biblical, epical, in its violence and in its deep, very cruel realism. The Road, it’s a zombie novel. It is. In the same way that Beloved is a ghost story. And that is something that I see emerging at the same time that I see auto-fiction winding down.

I was chatting to an Argentinian friend of mine who has a bookshop in Valencia, Todos Contentos y Yo También it’s called, and he was really interested in your plot building, how you build your stories.  Because there’s these moments where we’re given just the right amount of information to terrify the shit out of us, and then we leave. Is this something you plan in the sense of knowing when to stop giving information or when to stop the story to protect the fantastical element?

I write it all, and then I start to take away, which is something very common that a writer does. But when you’re doing genre it’s knowing what are the gross-out things that you have to leave to make the [makes a horrified face] moment, the disgusting moment that, to me, has to be there. And which is the amount of scary things that you have to leave. So it’s a different kind of skinning. In horror, it’s different because what you have to keep in mind is how much explanation you get. Not enough explanation: it looks lazy. Too much explanation: it’s boring. Where you are walking is very narrow. In general— because there’s not one answer to this— in general, I skin it until I reach the core of what scares me about it.

In “Rambla triste”, for example, what scares me of the story is that this place has a history that nobody knows, especially the tourists, and it was gentrified to hell. It scared me a lot, the fact that so many of my friends were there and I felt that they were lying, lying in the sense that they were saying they had a great life in Barcelona and it wasn’t true. With these things in mind, I start to skin and see different ways: not make the metaphor of gentrification the story; not make the story from my fear of migration for people my age; and not making it all about the ghosts of Barcelona, but finding the equilibrium between those three things that scare me and that probably will scare the reader.

When I was reading your novel, I had this question about the allegory of addiction. Juan wants to give up performing the rite, but can’t. You look at how he is drawn back to it, the mania, the coming and going. This is kind of implicit in the whole thing you were talking about before, of power and wanting to hold on to power. It’s not like it needs to be an allegory of addiction, it’s just that it’s inherent in these power structures, in these compulsions that we have, that live with us every day.

It is, yeah. I was very close to it personally, too, so I understand it. I use this a lot because violence has that [element] too. I talked to people that had problems with violence and somebody told me that it’s like a tattoo. You get your first tattoo, and then you want more, and then you want more, and more. And it’s a bit like, what if more? What if bigger? The addictive element I can understand. So yes, that is implicit in the whole novel. That’s why I didn’t have a character that is 100% an addict, for example, because I think it’s in all of them.  

I don’t know if it’s an allegory, but it’s definitely there because, to me, it’s motive. As a writer it’s something that comes very naturally when I have to ask, “But why does he need to do this?” He doesn’t need to, but he can’t help himself. And that to me is all the answer that you need, if you understand where I’m coming from.

Hmm. Yeah, it’s the thing about peeking behind the curtain, you know? The “what if”?

And the secret, too. I mean, many of our addictions are and our toxic behaviours with substances, with violence, with compulsion, many of the things we do are done in secret because either it’s illegal or we are ashamed of it. Thanks for picking it up because not not that many people pick it up, but it’s there. Yeah, definitely.

Yeah. So you’ve judged prizes before. Is there anything particular that you value or look for that comes back to your own writing of stories?

I think in short stories it’s a lot easier to hear the voice of the writer. The novel meanders. In the short story you are a bit more naked. That’s mostly what I’m looking for, because a writer without personality is…it kills everything.

And also what’s interesting about judging short fiction is that…well, that it’s short. I’m not being ironic with that. In the short story, you see what [the writer] can do, you see what [the writer] can’t do. And in a novel, there could be more disguise. Short stories are cruel that way. If it doesn’t work, you forget it in a second, and if it’s good, you never forget it. And that’s something very magical about a short story.

What was the last piece of writing that really blew your mind?

An American writer, Laura van den Berg, the book of short stories called I Hold a Wolf by the Ears. I think it was a book that I thought I wanted to write. It made me want to write. It made me feel the novel was unnecessary. Every story was so powerful and so well done that it was like, why bother with the novel if you have twenty novels here that are all good? Grace Paley used to say something like that.

You said that you had just finished a collection of short fiction. Is there anything you can tell us?

I just sent the second version to my agent, so it will go to the publisher soon. It’s eleven short stories. They’re longer. They’re not nouvelles or anything, but they’re longer. They’re more narrative and less… edgy, I think. It’s a bit more gentle in a way and I think I got that a bit from the kick I had writing Our Share of Night. To me, before this book, I think, characters were just like pawns. They were things I moved to get the idea, all the various ideas of what I was trying to talk about. But here, I think relationships and the voices of the characters, when they speak in the first person, are not just vehicles for the idea, but they’re more fleshy. There’s a bit that I found quite strange, because I always wrote up to this point about young people. But in many of the short stories people my age and older started appearing. And it’s amazing to write in voices that I haven’t tried, and I think it has to do weirdly with the things that we’ve been talking about. I don’t feel young anymore. I don’t feel old either.

Great! Thank you so much for chatting with us and I hope you enjoy the short fiction we send to you. We look forward to seeing your new book when it comes out.

Thank you very much.

 

For more information about the Desperate Literature Prize for Short Fiction see: www.desperateliterature.com/prize .The full video interview is available via the Desperate Literature Patreon and a full transcript of the interview is forthcoming on the Desperate Literature prize website.

Mariana Enríquez  is one of the most spellbinding narrators in Latin American literature. Her story collection Los Peligros de Fumar en la Cama (2009) was shortlisted for the 2021 International Booker and was a finalist of the Kirkus Prize. She has been featured in countless anthologies and magazines, including The New Yorker, Freeman’s, McSweeney’s, Granta UK, Granta en Español, and Asymptote. Her novel Nuestra Parte de Noche won the Herralde Novel Prize in 2019, the Premio Celsius, the Premio Kelvin 505, and most notably, the Premio de la Crítica in 2019. Our Share of Night was released by Granta in 2022.

Terry Craven is the co-owner of Desperate Literature, Madrid.