The Flow of Imagination or Dreams
Mariana Enríquez, Our Share of Night
Granta, 736pp, £18.99, ISBN 9781783786732
reviewed by Lucy Thynne
Mariana Enríquez gets good book covers. For her Man Booker-nominated short stories, The Dangers of Smoking in Bed, a disembodied face floats, a cigarette hanging out of one eye, a long-nailed hand curling around the other. For her latest book, Our Share of Night — her first novel published in English — that hand yawns out to fill the entire cover. It is a silhouette, the fingernails again horrifying and long, this time gold. They snag your attention well. Were they to tap at your window at night, you sense you would hear them.
That hand belongs to Juan, one of the novel’s protagonists. Juan is a medium: he possesses the unique ability to see the ghosts of the ‘Disappeared’, some 30,000 people killed by military squads between 1975-83 under Argentina’s Videla dictatorship. He is trapped in ‘The Order’, a cult created by his dead wife Rosario’s family, who force Juan to ceremonially summon ‘The Darkness.’ Here is the villain of the novel: a malign force that demands human sacrifice in exchange for immortality. It is a ‘bone collector,’ Enríquez writes, almost incants; ‘you didn’t talk to it. You didn’t negotiate.’ Juan’s wife Rosario has already fallen prey to it. And every time that Juan undergoes the strain of summoning it, he inches closer to death. His hands transform into those of the cover: they wither black, and the nails become talons of gold.
As genetic inheritance goes, the skill of a medium is more curse than blessing for Juan’s son Gaspar. Being able to tread between worlds makes Gaspar valuable to the Order, and forces father and son on the run. The novel opens with this road trip from Juan’s eyes, tracking the difficulties of grieving for his wife while caring for a child who can still glimpse her. The perspective then jumps, expertly, between the different periods preceding, during and following the tyrannies of Argentina’s political rule. Juan’s lover Tali watches the Darkness unfold from the side-lines. Rosario narrates the abusive yet beguiling upbringing amongst the Order in 1960s London. Gaspar deals with the dual aches of growing up and being painfully abnormal. ‘None of them were normal,’ Enríquez confirms; ‘not Gaspar or Rosario or Juan himself.’
If it’s not already obvious, Enríquez’s forte is the abnormal, the paranormal: horror. Horror that is insidious precisely because it then interlaces with the everyday. This dark, hybrid style of fiction is nothing new for Enríquez, whose writing steeps itself in fascination for the dead. Deceased children often wander between her short stories, and her nonfiction work Alguien camina sobre su tumba, informed by a background in journalism, takes an investigative trip to cemeteries all over the world. Of her preference for weird fiction, she has said that ‘sometimes realism is not enough’ for rendering Argentina’s dark past — that opting for horror is a necessary, compulsive act. It’s that compulsion that’s earned her much critical acclaim. She is affectionately called Argentina’s ‘princess of horror’, and in 2019, won Spain’s’ prestigious Premio Herralde for Our Share of Night, prior to the novel’s English translation. Last year, Kazuo Ishiguro issued a warm welcome for Enríquez’s ‘beautiful, horrible world’, calling it the ‘most exciting discovery I’ve made in fiction for some time.’
And what a horrible world it is. The father-son road trip builds to a flashback where Juan, recently widowed, is so enraged that he goes to confront their Order at their mansion near the Iguazú Falls. There, he summons the Darkness in a bout of terrifying violence. Experimenting with the occult then continues, in the flavour of Stephen King, with Gaspar’s ventures to a haunted house with his friends. None, predictably, emerge the same. These scenes are the most fast-paced of the novel, but it is the images that stay with the reader: the rumour of the house’s ‘old woman with her mouth open at the window’, Juan’s macabre box of eyelids, ‘translucent scraps of skin’ he toys with ‘like coins.’
Certainly, this world is horrible, but Ishiguro is right to call it beautiful, too. Where Our Share of Night excels is in its ability to find beauty, humanity, in the horror; the disappeared are grimly ‘thrown into rivers, their eyes eaten by fish, their feet tangled in vegetation.’ But by the time Enríquez is done describing them, they are also ‘mermaids with bellies full of lead.’ Gaspar’s grief for his mother is a horror in and of itself, but his memories of her are threaded tenderly throughout the book: ‘putting a cold cloth on his forehead’ when he is sick, ‘in bed, teaching him what the [tarot] cards meant.’ If the premise of Our Share of Night risks sounding too dark to bear, it is counteracted by these moments of illumination. There’s a nice scene when Gaspar and Juan are deliberating their fate with the Order, and giggle at their simultaneous confessions that they could ‘both really use a smoke.’
Sex is another opportunity for light relief. How well, how sensitively Enríquez does it — there’s something about the way her sentences arrive at the right beats, seamlessly cutting from hand to body part, that feels almost filmic. Juan, as with many of the novel’s characters, is bisexual, and his queer relationships are freeing rather than destructive, as they were in Enríquez’s first novel, Baja es lo peor. But best and most subtle is Gaspar’s navigation of adolescent sexuality, his torrent of questions that then dips again, as per Enríquez’s style, into the light: he felt ‘the unease of not knowing if the girl had liked it . . . if he’d put the condom on right, if it was bad to fall asleep afterwards.’ It’s rare to find a novel that contains those details. Gaspar ruminates over them in patterns of speech that we have seen transform from child to teenager, changes brought out by Megan McDowell’s careful translation.
It's difficult to get across the ease with which Enríquez seems to write. Enríquez has spoken in interviews about the ‘flow’ she enters when writing, a state that writer Elena Ferrante has described as the point of ‘forgetting’ where one is, where the hours slip away, unnoticed. Some might argue that the point of this ‘flow’ onto the page is to secrete itself, to make the scaffolding poles behind the writing process invisible, the prose natural. But what is admirable with Enríquez is exactly the reverse her writing glides in the same bewitching, summoned style as its content. When Juan summons the Darkness, for example, he ‘focused on the sign, focused until he was far away from heat and siestas, floating among dead stars, searching among the bones for the seal of the summons, the permission, the welcome.’ You sense that flow loosening everything, bringing us to a point where what does not happen is just as important as what does. Juan, ‘raw and tired’ after the ceremony, felt he ‘was capable of hearing colours.’ Later, ‘he dreamed the Darkness was cold and wet, he dreamed of chattering teeth and twisted beings and fields of bodies and forests of hands.’ Where the flow of imagination or dreams takes us is not discounted, it’s just as real.
Sometimes, this ‘flow’ goes on too long. Ironically, for a writer who has cut her teeth in short stories, the only weakness here is the book’s 736-page length. Details of the Order’s backstory detract from what feels more important: the central relationship between Rosario, Juan, and Gaspar. A diversion to England does not feel necessary when really, we’re here for what the Order snobbishly call the ‘ass-end of the world’: Argentina, in all its gothic glory, in its winding streets, in its abandoned houses and its pulsing nightclubs. We’re here for floating faces, for cigarettes dangling out of them, for the knock of fingernails, resplendent and gold.
That hand belongs to Juan, one of the novel’s protagonists. Juan is a medium: he possesses the unique ability to see the ghosts of the ‘Disappeared’, some 30,000 people killed by military squads between 1975-83 under Argentina’s Videla dictatorship. He is trapped in ‘The Order’, a cult created by his dead wife Rosario’s family, who force Juan to ceremonially summon ‘The Darkness.’ Here is the villain of the novel: a malign force that demands human sacrifice in exchange for immortality. It is a ‘bone collector,’ Enríquez writes, almost incants; ‘you didn’t talk to it. You didn’t negotiate.’ Juan’s wife Rosario has already fallen prey to it. And every time that Juan undergoes the strain of summoning it, he inches closer to death. His hands transform into those of the cover: they wither black, and the nails become talons of gold.
As genetic inheritance goes, the skill of a medium is more curse than blessing for Juan’s son Gaspar. Being able to tread between worlds makes Gaspar valuable to the Order, and forces father and son on the run. The novel opens with this road trip from Juan’s eyes, tracking the difficulties of grieving for his wife while caring for a child who can still glimpse her. The perspective then jumps, expertly, between the different periods preceding, during and following the tyrannies of Argentina’s political rule. Juan’s lover Tali watches the Darkness unfold from the side-lines. Rosario narrates the abusive yet beguiling upbringing amongst the Order in 1960s London. Gaspar deals with the dual aches of growing up and being painfully abnormal. ‘None of them were normal,’ Enríquez confirms; ‘not Gaspar or Rosario or Juan himself.’
If it’s not already obvious, Enríquez’s forte is the abnormal, the paranormal: horror. Horror that is insidious precisely because it then interlaces with the everyday. This dark, hybrid style of fiction is nothing new for Enríquez, whose writing steeps itself in fascination for the dead. Deceased children often wander between her short stories, and her nonfiction work Alguien camina sobre su tumba, informed by a background in journalism, takes an investigative trip to cemeteries all over the world. Of her preference for weird fiction, she has said that ‘sometimes realism is not enough’ for rendering Argentina’s dark past — that opting for horror is a necessary, compulsive act. It’s that compulsion that’s earned her much critical acclaim. She is affectionately called Argentina’s ‘princess of horror’, and in 2019, won Spain’s’ prestigious Premio Herralde for Our Share of Night, prior to the novel’s English translation. Last year, Kazuo Ishiguro issued a warm welcome for Enríquez’s ‘beautiful, horrible world’, calling it the ‘most exciting discovery I’ve made in fiction for some time.’
And what a horrible world it is. The father-son road trip builds to a flashback where Juan, recently widowed, is so enraged that he goes to confront their Order at their mansion near the Iguazú Falls. There, he summons the Darkness in a bout of terrifying violence. Experimenting with the occult then continues, in the flavour of Stephen King, with Gaspar’s ventures to a haunted house with his friends. None, predictably, emerge the same. These scenes are the most fast-paced of the novel, but it is the images that stay with the reader: the rumour of the house’s ‘old woman with her mouth open at the window’, Juan’s macabre box of eyelids, ‘translucent scraps of skin’ he toys with ‘like coins.’
Certainly, this world is horrible, but Ishiguro is right to call it beautiful, too. Where Our Share of Night excels is in its ability to find beauty, humanity, in the horror; the disappeared are grimly ‘thrown into rivers, their eyes eaten by fish, their feet tangled in vegetation.’ But by the time Enríquez is done describing them, they are also ‘mermaids with bellies full of lead.’ Gaspar’s grief for his mother is a horror in and of itself, but his memories of her are threaded tenderly throughout the book: ‘putting a cold cloth on his forehead’ when he is sick, ‘in bed, teaching him what the [tarot] cards meant.’ If the premise of Our Share of Night risks sounding too dark to bear, it is counteracted by these moments of illumination. There’s a nice scene when Gaspar and Juan are deliberating their fate with the Order, and giggle at their simultaneous confessions that they could ‘both really use a smoke.’
Sex is another opportunity for light relief. How well, how sensitively Enríquez does it — there’s something about the way her sentences arrive at the right beats, seamlessly cutting from hand to body part, that feels almost filmic. Juan, as with many of the novel’s characters, is bisexual, and his queer relationships are freeing rather than destructive, as they were in Enríquez’s first novel, Baja es lo peor. But best and most subtle is Gaspar’s navigation of adolescent sexuality, his torrent of questions that then dips again, as per Enríquez’s style, into the light: he felt ‘the unease of not knowing if the girl had liked it . . . if he’d put the condom on right, if it was bad to fall asleep afterwards.’ It’s rare to find a novel that contains those details. Gaspar ruminates over them in patterns of speech that we have seen transform from child to teenager, changes brought out by Megan McDowell’s careful translation.
It's difficult to get across the ease with which Enríquez seems to write. Enríquez has spoken in interviews about the ‘flow’ she enters when writing, a state that writer Elena Ferrante has described as the point of ‘forgetting’ where one is, where the hours slip away, unnoticed. Some might argue that the point of this ‘flow’ onto the page is to secrete itself, to make the scaffolding poles behind the writing process invisible, the prose natural. But what is admirable with Enríquez is exactly the reverse her writing glides in the same bewitching, summoned style as its content. When Juan summons the Darkness, for example, he ‘focused on the sign, focused until he was far away from heat and siestas, floating among dead stars, searching among the bones for the seal of the summons, the permission, the welcome.’ You sense that flow loosening everything, bringing us to a point where what does not happen is just as important as what does. Juan, ‘raw and tired’ after the ceremony, felt he ‘was capable of hearing colours.’ Later, ‘he dreamed the Darkness was cold and wet, he dreamed of chattering teeth and twisted beings and fields of bodies and forests of hands.’ Where the flow of imagination or dreams takes us is not discounted, it’s just as real.
Sometimes, this ‘flow’ goes on too long. Ironically, for a writer who has cut her teeth in short stories, the only weakness here is the book’s 736-page length. Details of the Order’s backstory detract from what feels more important: the central relationship between Rosario, Juan, and Gaspar. A diversion to England does not feel necessary when really, we’re here for what the Order snobbishly call the ‘ass-end of the world’: Argentina, in all its gothic glory, in its winding streets, in its abandoned houses and its pulsing nightclubs. We’re here for floating faces, for cigarettes dangling out of them, for the knock of fingernails, resplendent and gold.