Things We Lost in the Fire by Mariana Enríquez

Useless adults, we thought, how useless.’ In 1992, the three young protagonists in this story make a new acquaintance.

In ‘The Intoxicated Years’, for example, the section of the story which is set in 1989, begins: ‘All that summer the electricity went off for six hours at a time government orders, because the country had no more energy, they said, though we didn’t really understand what that meant… What would a widespread blackout be like? Would we be left in the dark forever? The possibility was incredible. The historical context which fills each one is thoroughly and sensually explained and explored. Here, ‘exhausted fathers conjure up child-killers, and young women, tired of suffering in silence, decide there’s nothing left to do but set themselves on fire.’Įach of the stories here is highly evocative they feel like sharp scratches, or aching punches to the stomach in the power which they wield. They are almost entirely set in the Argentinian capital, Buenos Aires, described in the book’s blurb as a series of ‘crime-ridden streets of post-dictatorship’. The twelve stories collected in Things We Lost in the Fire are of ‘ghosts, demons and wild women of sharp-toothed children and stolen skulls’. I cautiously began it in broad daylight, but was surprisingly brave enough to read a couple of these stories just before bedtime. The Irish Times goes further, proclaiming that this is the only book which has caused their reviewer to be ‘afraid to turn out the lights’. It sounded wonderfully creepy and unsettling the Financial Times writes that it is ‘full of claustrophobic terror’, and Dave Eggers says that it ‘hits with the force of a freight train’. Argentinian author Mariana Enriquez’ debut English language collection, Things We Lost in the Fire, had been on my radar for a while before I found a copy in my local library.

Things We Lost in the Fire by Mariana Enríquez