A review by curiousreader
Things We Lost in the Fire by Mariana Enríquez

challenging dark tense medium-paced
  • Loveable characters? No
  • Diverse cast of characters? No
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
Things we lost in the fire is described by its English translator, Megan McDowell, as part of a South American Gothic tradition. Horror is born within the context of the everyday, built upon a history of violent dictatorships, still echoing in people’s memories and lives years after its supposed conclusion. Poverty, drugs, crime, and violence against women create the background to which Enriquez imagines horrors of such sharpness as to hit you like a gutt-punch, over and over again. One thing McDowell describes in the translator’s note that I found particularly on-point is that while there is often an edge of the supernatural in these stories, Enriquez’s form of horror is always ultimately based in real fears. There is this realness that makes them so very uncomfortable to read, aside from the rawness of the content itself. Despite already being shocked by the first story in this collection — a young woman witnessing the awful living circumstances of a boy on the street, who she finally ends up ignoring despite his obvious signs of neglect - I kept somehow falling into the trap of the safety Enriquez initially lulls the reader into believing could be true. Each story creates a familiar setting with a sense of things, while not necessarily being great at least being liveable, only to turn the everyday into a nightmare with a sharp turn, a twist that hits you like a slap before you know it. Truly, there were moments when I felt mad at the author for managing to manipulate me into trusting myself in her hands - and to have it hit back at me with such force, I remember flinching at least once with every single story.

While the violence is often hard to stomach, on so many levels, I did think there was sharp commentary on among other things how groups act and feed of each other’s energy in violent acts, women’s vulnerability (in society, in relationships) and their attempts to regain power through potentially destructive means, the avoidance and/or blindness to poverty and despair around us and the normalisation of inhumane living circumstances over time. The balancing of a supernatural edge - the fantastical element to the stories always being used to add a nightmarish quality - also worked well to strengthen the exploration of fears - blurring the lines between the real and the imagined, the living and the dead.
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