The 3 best books by Mariana EnrĂ­quez

Sometimes it seems like Samantha Schweblin y Mariana Enriquez they were the same person. Both porteñas, writers and practically contemporaries. The two intense narrators of transgressive stories and novels in substance and form. How not to suspect it? Similar things have been seen in recent writers like carmen mola o Elena Ferrante...

But today we have to address the work of Mariana Enríquez. And the thing is that certain approaches give vertigo. Because Mariana's literature has a sustained intensity since at her tender 19 years old she already composed her first novel «Bajar es lo worst», a story that marked a whole generation in Argentina.

Since then, Mariana has been carried away by terrifying scenarios, by creepy fantasies, like a Edgar Allan Poe transmuted to these uncertain days, for moments more sinister than yours. And from those scenarios, Mariana knows how to combine that surprising, fatalistic and grumbling existentialism, determined to destroy any glimmer of hope. Only in this way can her characters shine at times, in flashes of humanity of bitter blinding lucidity.

3 best books by Mariana Enriquez

Our part of the night

The magical mix between the Gothic, the fantastic and that crude realism that borders on the existential, acquires in this novel levels of fascinating surprise.

Under that notion of the road novel in which the trip facilitates the exposition of motives for every author, Mariana puts us in the back seat of a car bound for the north of Argentina. In front of us we find Gaspar and his father, relevant members of a sect in which they no longer believe they fit completely.

Because in the same way that a personal crisis can lead a person to these types of sinister congregations, a great loss can also end up pushing them away, as in this case. Only it is already known that leaving certain sites is more difficult than unsubscribing from a telephone company (to put a point of humor).

In the Order, Gaspar had his role very well determined. Because he aimed at the perfect medium, the most gifted to elevate rituals to maximum levels of connection with eternity. It is not surprising that Gaspar is considered this way, because the origins of the Order are connected with his mother's branch and he is the heir to unsuspected virtues beyond our daily dimensions.

Getting into the car towards the liberation of the heavy load of a Gaspar whom his father tries to save, we live memories of the mother traced as a chronicle of the hard days of Argentina in the XNUMXth century.

With the strangeness of a distorting mirror, the fears and misgivings of the fleeing father and son are combined with dark horrors of black magic, with much more real terrors about the experience of the absent mother.

Because the passing of time offers that creepy glimpse into the past, in which the shadows loomed not only over a centuries-old sect but also over a world with serious social and political problems, perhaps used by the most sectarian powers of royal governments.

Our part of the night

The things we lost in the fire

When a story is clothed in the dreamlike or the fantastic, it becomes a story. And when a story ends up undressing miseries, offering intense flashes that burn the soul, and ends up sentencing with morals you throw dust like bones in the fire, the story becomes a chronicle of the disaster.

Because this author leads us, in these eleven stories, through the disturbing idea of ​​destruction, dressed on each stage in her new gala dress for each last dance.

With a kind of morbid reader that makes us observe the disaster with the intense sense of fortune to walk free of guilt, each story delves into obsessions and fears, in repudiation of the social, in sick animosities, but also in the laughable of our future , in the glow of the magic to which we surrender as a religion when our imagination overflows our defeated reality towards hecatomb.

Decadence has juice and charm for a narrator like Mariana who knows how to select the most powerful images, those that lead us to an unimaginable empathy with so many characters immersed in perdition, in guilt, in a routine that devours them, in philias or phobias. made psychopathies between the hilarious and the overwhelming.

The things we lost in the fire

This is the sea

A story of the fan phenomenon from within, from the deepest part that turns idols into the empty sustenance of the most soulless lives. Beyond euphoria, music as a way of life, shadowed myths and cannon fodder legends of youthful vitality turned into disenchantment. Of course, the Fallen gang is not the Back Street Boys.

The message is very different. Youth is a hectic schedule to burn, because all that comes after is the fall. It is not about prosecuting the messengers of decadence, musicians like Kurt Cobain or Amy Winehouse, it is more about observing a youth fascinated with self-destruction that finds in lyrics and tunes the chords of their departure to hell.

Viewing youth as a fan trend towards an anticipated end, Mariana EnrĂ­quez introduces us to Helena, a staunch follower of the Fallen and her siren songs towards the spontaneous combustion of youth. You can love to the extreme, to the parasitic of the soul. The pole of hatred is in that last rung of sex as essential chemistry. You can listen to music, just music, but knowing that each chord is an invitation to death.

Everything depends on a sense like hearing, so influenced by the greatest of beauties or the worst of nightmares. The glory of Helena would be to meet those idols in a single tour with bitter taste to say goodbye to everything.

Because reality can cease to exist, every problem can find in loneliness and isolation the nihilistic answers towards oblivion. And that's why Helena only looks for that, her meeting with her idols, of whom she knows everything and to whom she intends to give her life as a reward for being the only ones who have known how to cradle her fears and resignations.

Fallen and his music as an alibi to live on the edge. References to many of those who composed, sang and lived accordingly with his tragic world outlook.

The essential chemistry, the riot of neurons and hormones. Youth, gold and tinsel. Dreams consumed by laziness in the XXI century. Helena, a fan of destruction turned into music of grimly captivating messages ...

This is the sea
5/5 - (15 votes)

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