the dangers of smoking in bed by mariana enriquez

And fiction writers often employ magic realism in order to harness the surreal travesties of existence, often those caused by tyrannical institutions-think Mikhail Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita, Toni Morrison’s Beloved, and, more recently, Yōko Ogawa’s The Memory Police. A short story can function as a literary experiment, a place where a writer might develop new modes of narrative and shred rules with abandon. Short stories and magic realism are both the territory of the radical and revolutionary. They feature ghosts, witches, curses and cannibals while being equally rife with sexual violence, juntas, self-harm, and all manner of vividly rendered trauma. They are both story collections in which the oxymoronic phrase “magic realism” manifests to an extreme. Though she has been publishing fiction and journalism for nearly thirty years in her native Argentina, so far only two books have been translated from their original Spanish into English: Things We Lost in the Fire and now The Dangers of Smoking in Bed. Eventually and invariably, you discover that you are right. You don’t know why exactly, but you are certain something is wrong. Stepping into a Mariana Enriquez story, everything at first appears normal: people, furniture, lighting it’s all there nothing’s amiss. 'The girls had opened the casket to feed on Espina's remains with devotion and disgust around the grave, pools of vomit bore witness to their efforts.A Review of Mariana Enriquez’s short story collection The Dangers of Smoking in Bed 'The sheets were impregnated with the smell of chicken cutlets.' 'Coca ate her cat, and then she killed herself.' Get a taste of Latin-American gothic, and read this book if you like sentences like: This is urban horror at its best: giving voices to the marginalized, the forgotten, and the lost. The bizarre and absurd becomes the norm, and the characters are obviously deranged, yet quickly acceptant of their new fates. Stories that are titled “Kids Who Came Back,” “Meat', “Rambla Triste”, and my personal favorite: “Back When We Talked to The Dead.”

Something horrific is happening, but it’s all perfectly normal. Sometimes in the first person, sometimes in the third person, there is always this sort of mesmerizing “casual fatalism” in the way the story is being told. There’s serious stuff in these stories - death, baby ghosts following protagonists around, missing children reappearing years later in parks looking the same age as when they disappeared, creating national hubbub and madness, curses of extreme fear, and witchcraft assisting family betrayals.īut what’s most poignant is the narrative style.

The dangers of smoking in bed by mariana enriquez