Philipp Engel Barcelona
Barcelona
Updated Friday, March 8, 2024-9:35 p.m.
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Mariana Enriquez
is a star.
Consecrated with the monumental
Nuestra parte de la noche
(always in Anagrama), she has fans all over the world who fill theaters like the Buenos Aires Coliseum to see her in person.
A sunny place for gloomy people
is her third book of stories.
There are 12 horror stories with ghosts and copious doses of
body horror
, perhaps because the writer has already turned half a century, an age in which she already looks back and
her own body begins to be an enemy
.
No one escapes deterioration, it's better to take it with humor, like she does.
In a story of the same name, Julie is an overweight, medicated girl who has sex with ghosts.
Enriquez is even able to make us laugh by recounting the surgical removal of a benign fibroid.
Of course, then the nightmares come.
Do you think Milei, with his Texas Chainsaw Massacre
-style chainsaw
, is a self-aware villain? No, I think he believes he is a superhero and that the villains are others.
Like Batman, a dark superhero, or Iron Man, a businessman who sold weapons.
The chainsaw is to cut down the State.
He won the elections, and although he is legitimate, he shows that democracy is not a guarantee of anything.
More than the character, he worries me about the reactionary turn of the society that has chosen him.
They remain convinced, I do not notice disappointment, beyond the sectors that are being attacked, such as journalism, cinema, public television, theater, the publishing world... I think it is something messianic, they think it can save them because it is different from the others.
To know more
LITERATURE.
Mariana Enríquez: "Terror is always political"
Editor: MATÍAS NÉSPOLO Barcelona
Mariana Enríquez: "Terror is always political"
Literature.
Argentine Mariana Enríquez wins the Herralde prize with a trip to the years of the Military Junta
Editor: VANESSA GRAELL Barcelona
Argentine Mariana Enríquez wins the Herralde prize with a trip to the years of the Military Junta
Did you see the movie
When Evil Stalks
?
It is now given a prophetic meaning. Yes, I loved that film, especially coming from Argentina, which does not have the resources to make fantastic films.
It is very well made and very scary.
It was a symptom of many very claustrophobic and violent things that were in society, that feeling that something horrible is going to happen, that feeling of when this is going to explode, how much longer can we live badly. That connects with the first story of this book,
My sad dead
, where the violence in the Buenos Aires suburbs leaves it plagued by recent ghosts. In the suburbs all the expressions of the crisis coexist: the middle class that is terrified of falling into poverty, people who are already poor and people who are already in a marginalized condition and who, in many cases, have to resort to crime.
Maybe they are bricklayers by day and sell drugs by night.
Sometimes there is a block of distance between them, and that makes the distrust much higher.
They are places where people are forced to live with their own fears as well.
And in many cases they are real because they really steal from you.
That story about how they shot the thief who fell and waited for him to die before calling the police was told to me by a co-worker.
Sometimes it happens that a teenager goes out at night, goes dancing, and in the middle of the night they call their parents saying they have kidnapped them.
The parents pay and then the drunk boy shows up at seven in the morning.
If after this, they call and ask you for help because he is beating my husband to death, you cut him off.
Because you say no, that they already did this to me. It is increasingly difficult to discern reality and lies. Yes, people tell you I saw it on YouTube, or it came to me on WhatsApp, and it could be any moron who uploaded it. something and say anything.
It's added stress.
When I started writing horror, one of my recurring themes was reality like the Matrix, the idea of another reality behind it, with all the terror that that implies.
Is the dream true or is the nightmare true? He is a die-hard fan of many things.
Is it their way of keeping you close to the origins? Yes, like all of us who work in culture, and I think that's fine.
I am absolutely against the fact that, due to the passage of time, I have to behave in a certain way.
If I had adult responsibilities that I don't have, such as having children, I would try to mother my children as best I could, but then I would spend all night listening to piano versions of Bruce Springsteen's songs about New Jersey.
My model is Patti Smith. I already read that she listened to
Because the night
while writing these stories.
Is it true that she is also upset because she couldn't write song lyrics? Yes, with translations in the United States it is totally impossible and that makes me very angry because I was raised differently.
I came to musicians from epigraphs by Rodrigo Fresán.
Stephen King used to play the Ramones and Ryan Adams in recent years, but now it's like the last kicks of a dying capitalism: I forbid you this and that.
We have reached the impossibility of making connections.
It is petty and even counterproductive for artists, because we gave each other visibility. At least you can cite other influences such as the painter Mildred Burton.
These stories are also very impregnated with plastic, right? Yes, I really like Mildred Burton, a little-known Argentine painter who was also a forger, and she was very crazy.
Maybe she was 70 years old, she came to a cocktail party and said that she was pregnant, something she maintained for seven or eight years.
And I really like visual art in general, and that's what I put clothes into too.
She had never used it before and here I started using it because I spend many hours on Instagram looking at paintings.
It is no longer just in the museum.
I actually saw the paintings that appear in
A Local Artist
in that abandoned train station.
It was a very strange thing, they were very disturbing and quite well executed.
I don't know who in that town could do something like that.
I put the whole story together from them. Is Marjorie Cameron, whom you also quote, also another model? Yes, there are many occultists who fascinate me.
In magic and the occult, a lot of place was given to women.
Almost all mediums were women, and they joined the suffragette and proto-feminist movements of the time because it was a way to be financially independent and also to be independent of a man.
There was also more sexual freedom, because the sessions were quite strange in that sense.
They had something sensual about them, you could touch the ghost, the girls appeared, they were very young and pretty in many cases. There is a story in Los Angeles and you can tell that the city fascinates her.
She also remembers Bret Easton Ellis, with whom she has been compared since her beginnings.
I'm a big fan of LA as a space for imagination.
It is a ghostly city that produces myths that you will always see, even if they are dead.
That destroyed
downtown
with hotels that are also ghosts... There is a lot of social contrast, there are the richest people in the world but then there are abandoned people like I have never seen in Latin America.
And always in the center, unlike in the rest of the world, where marginality is usually on the periphery.
And yes,
Less than zero
It was very important in my life.
When I read it, I thought: This is my life!
Although they were richer, we also always went by car, looking for cocaine.
Ellis captures that wandering very well, and there are not many who know how to portray the work it is to go after drugs.
That sordid adventure that the Safdie brothers capture so well in a film like
Heaven Knows What
, although there was more heroin there and in Argentina there is still no heroin.
We never had.