Las cosas que perdimos en el fuego

Mariana Enriquez

Book - 2017

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SPANISH/FICTION/Enriquez
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1st Floor SPANISH/FICTION/Enriquez Due Apr 6, 2024
Subjects
Genres
Short stories
Published
Nueva York : Vintage Español, una división de Penguin Random House LLC [2017].
Language
Spanish
Main Author
Mariana Enriquez (author)
Edition
Primera edición Vintage Español
Physical Description
197 pages ; 21 cm
ISBN
9780525432548
  • El chico sucio
  • La Hostería
  • Los años intoxicados
  • La casa de Adela
  • Pablito clavó un clavito: una evocación del Petiso Orejudo
  • Tela de araña
  • Fin de curso
  • Nada de carne sobre nosotras
  • El patio del vecino
  • Bajo el agua negra
  • Verde rojo anaranjado
  • Las cosas que perdimos en el fuego.
Review by New York Times Review

The girls and women in Enriquez's stories worry about their friendships, their figures, their spacious apartments in dangerous neighborhoods, their waning attraction to their boyfriends and husbands, only to confront the horror that courses underneath it all: noises only they can hear, children only they can see, neighbors with grisly secrets. Not all the terror is hidden: a skull found in a trash heap, with a name and date - "Tati, 1975" - etched into the bone; a child whose nose is wide "like a cat's," deformed by the polluted tributary that runs through the city's slum; shelves covered with fingernails and teeth, and a pantry full of rotting meat. Enriquez's stories are historically aware and classconscious, but her characters never avail themselves of sentimentalism or comfort. She's after a truth more profound, and more disturbing, than whatever the strict dictates of realism will allow. There is something almost biblical about the evil that threads through this collection, only the evil here is more vicious and unyielding, without the consolations of God or rescue. This isn't to say the stories are unreadable - far from it. They are propulsive and mesmerizing, laced with vivid descriptions of the grotesque (another skillful translation by McDowell) and the darkest humor. Two teenage girls decide to play a trick on an innkeeper by sneaking into the empty rooms after dark, cutting holes in mattresses and sticking chorizo sausages inside. But they fail to factor the inn's past into their plans; it had been a police academy three decades before, during the military dictatorship whose deeds included murder and forced disappearances - what one of the girls obliquely refers to as "that stuff we studied in school." I will be haunted for some time by the indelible images in this book: a woman disfigured by burns, her neck "a maroon mask crisscrossed by spider webs"; bodies buried in cement. The most frightening atrocities are those that touch on Argentina's actual present and past, as if to remind us that the true source of evil is not supernatural but man-made. JENNIFER szalai is an editor at the Book Review.

Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [January 1, 2017]