Mariana Enriquez has lived in Argentina her whole life, so it’s not surprising that most of her stories are grounded in the history and culture of that country. Things We Lost in the Fire, the second collection of short fiction she wrote but the first one to be translated into English, deals with the painful legacy of the dictatorship that formerly ruled the country, as well as the inequality that many Argentinians deal with today.
The characters in Enriquez’s stories face extreme circumstances. But whether these circumstances are created by other humans or by more esoteric forces, Enriquez maintains a matter-of-fact narrative voice that works very well. Many reviewers have described her work as belonging to the South American literary tradition of magical realism, in which uncanny events are accepted by the characters as a natural part of the world. The tone of the stories in Things We Lost in the Fire really lends itself to this. Supernatural horrors exist alongside mundane ones, and sometimes the line between them starts to blur.
“Adela’s House” was far and away my favorite story. Enriquez does a masterful job of creating a sense of creeping dread. She also makes good use of ambiguity. We never find out the exact nature of the house or what happens to the character who goes in and doesn’t come out. And it works! “Under the Black Water” was also excellent. It’s a Lovecraftian story, but there’s a lot more going on than just people being menaced by tentacled monsters. The corruption and callousness of humans creates the circumstances that lead to the thing under the black water beginning to stir its sleep. “The Dirty Kid” was the most visceral and moving story in the collection. The narrator’s realization that she’s been pretending to understand how the people around her live while having a safety net that they don’t feels uncomfortable to the reader, because she’s the character we naturally identify with. But that discomfort is what makes the story so powerful.
Things We Lost in the Fire is a short collection, but there’s so much emotion, history, and sheer weirdness packed into the stories that it was still a satisfying read. It makes me excited to read her second collection, The Dangers of Smoking in Bed.
Outside of a Dog 