His daughter, enmeshed in the surreal revenge act of inserting raw chorizos into the establishment’s mattresses, is set upon by yelling, thumping spirits – when their brief visit ends, they are discredited with the same vehemence as the erasure of history itself. History itself is disappeared: in ‘The Inn’, another strong piece, a man is fired for revealing the violent past use of the inn he works at, a former police academy during the dictatorship. In ‘The Dirty Kid’, the collection’s hard-hitting first story, a street kid and his newborn sibling vanish other tales feature children who step off a bus or inside a haunted house and into the unknown. With Things We Lost in the Fire, the disappearances continue.
Indeed, Enríquez places herself in the tradition of Borges and Cortázar, for whom fantastic themes did not obscure the material reality of Latin American people – in Argentina’s case, two bloody military dictatorships in the second half of the twentieth century, with tens of thousands ‘disappeared’. Peopled by apparitions, uncertainty, and colourful folk religion, the stories are set against sprawling backdrops of poverty and inequality.
Fans of magical realism will appreciate Argentine Mariana Enríquez’s latest volume of short stories.
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