These Short Stories Set in Argentina Are Both Chilling and Thrilling
The magnificent Isabel Allende looms large as the doyenne of Latin American literature. But there’s an emerging generation of women writers who are tapping into the richness of the magical realism tradition most associated with Gabriel García Márquez—and they've got their own singular, wholly fresh veins of wondrous weirdness.
Argentina’s Samanta Schweblin, Chile’s Paulina Flores, and Brazil’s Carola Saavedra are a few who dance a fine line between the miraculous and the mad. Now, Argentine writer Mariana Enríquez joins their ranks with a ravishing new story collection, The Dangers of Smoking in Bed, a volume that reimagines the Gothic and gives it an entirely new spin. (Like Flores and Schweblin, Enriquez's work is translated into English by Megan McDowell.) As in her previous collection, Things We Lost in the Fire, Enríquez mines her inner Poe: Her characters grapple with ghosts and their own hauntings. Their spirits are low, but the stakes couldn’t be higher.
While Enríquez's prose is precise and disciplined, her soul is pure punk, the opposite of the “elegant” Allende, whom she reveres. Her American influences range from filmmaker Gus Van Sant’s My Own Private Idaho to Iggy Pop's music to Anne Rice's vampire oeuvre. And she’s long been fascinated by gay desire; she spent her youth, she's noted in past interviews, with “tousled hair and military boots,” a portrait of the artist as a clenched fist, transforming her love of all things underground into a brilliant career. As her fiction attests, she’s kept her outsider stance as she’s transitioned into middle age.
But Enríquez is also a clinician of the body, dissecting her characters—sometimes literally—with a surgeon’s scalpel. The decay of our physical selves, the fears of an afterlife, and sudden surges of sex ignite these stories with a blue flame; her exploration of female self-pleasure is both erotic and chilling. In “Angelita Unearthed,” a girl excavates the bones of an infant only to confront, a decade later, the dead baby stalking her. “Our Lady of the Quarry” has a spatter of Stephen King: a clique of sex-crazed teenagers confronts their monstrous lust on a torrid summer afternoon. And there are puzzles within puzzles: “The Lookout” offers a Borgesian take on the Overlook Hotel, as a specter lures a distraught tourist through a maze-like resort to a tragic end.
Enríquez assaults all of our senses, but is particularly attuned to smell. Sofía, a young woman from Buenos Aires visiting ex-pat friends in Barcelona, immediately detects a stench hovering over the city. Her friends whisper about a pedophile ring, missing children, and Sofía becomes a true detective of the supernatural. “What if her apprehension came only from her deep antipathy for proud Barcelona? What if hers was the phobia of a provincial tourist? She’d just decided to keep quiet when the smell inundated her nose like a hot pepper, like strong mint, making her eyes water; a smell that was almost palpable, black, from the crypt.”
And in the title story, another troubled woman holes up in her apartment, doused in cigarette smoke, passing the days by observing the moths who burn against her lamp. She tries to masturbate, but can’t do it. “Her body was failing her in many more ways she didn’t want to think about,” Enríquez writes. “Who would ever love her like that, with dandruff, depression, zits on her back, cellulite, hemorrhoids, and everything dry, so dry.”
The Dangers of Smoking in Bed establishes Enríquez as a premier Latin American voice. Enríquez's extraordinary—and extraordinarily ominous—fiction holds up a mirror to our bewildering times, when borders between the everyday and the inexplicable blur, and converge.
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