IN HER collection of short stories set in Buenos Aires, Things We Lost in the Fire, Mariana Enriquez scratches satisfyingly at Argentina’s underbelly. Her version of a city so often celebrated for its splendor is one of drug addicts and corrupt policemen, slums and satanic rituals. It’s a city that Enriquez, 43, knows intimately. “Buenos Aires hides its problems well,” she says by phone from her home in the Argentine capital. “You have to look to see its dark side.”
Enriquez looks hard, keeping the lens of her stories trained on the city’s less salubrious areas, examining frustrated relationships, teenage friendships, disappointing partners and dark crimes. Her characters become twisted by suspicion and obsession, or are sucked in by the supernatural. They come apart quietly at the seams, destroyed by themselves or others.
When it comes to gritty iction, Enriquez has a rap sheet. At 20, she published her first book, a novel about two young boys. In it, she wrote about drugs and gay sex and things people were surprised she knew about. Her inspiration, she says, came from the Brontës and the French 19th-century Decadents, vampire literature and American writers like Bret Easton Ellis and Hubert Selby Jr., who built their iction around the seamier side of New York City life. A move into journalism followed, and today she works at Página/12, a left-wing newspaper in Buenos Aires.