A Sunny Place for Shady People: Stories is Mariana Enriquez’s follow-up to her brilliant and terrifying novel Our Share of the Night. This new collection is a triumphant return to the short form, a return that still contains the horror and sophistication of her novel but in more digestible bites. Readers of Enriquez will recognize her exploration of horror in this collection, all the while offering something new, something frighteningly comprehensible and insightful into our contemporary human condition.
Freud defines the uncanny as something frighteningly or strangely familiar, and it’s in this exploration of the unheimlich in which readers find themselves. I suspect that Enriquez’s deliberate turn off the main roads and into the realm of the strange and terrifying depicts a world that has long been strangely familiar to those who live in South America, especially Argentina and its history of violence and social and economic struggles. And yet, the worlds and characters Enriquez writes about could be found in our own back yards, which is a testament to her ability to tap into the dark recesses of the human psyche, male, female, or non-binary. Her characters are alive and suffer, as only humans suffer, and her worlds are only slightly darker versions of the ones we all find ourselves within, but light enough to throw our shadows up against the walls.
The stories in this collection are mostly about women who find themselves under a tremendous amount of emotional and sometimes physical stress. There is rape, sickness, aging, and a trope of hysteria reminiscent of Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper” or any of Shirley Jackson’s writing. In “The Face of Disgrace” a woman’s face begins to suffer from what seems to be stroke-like trauma, but the woman gradually declines and loses the physical characteristics of her face all together.
“The Metamorphosis” follows a woman who has a hysterectomy for possible cancer. In brutal detail the narrator allows the reader to experience her pain, her grief. In one particularly raw scene she states that “Nor do they warn you, of course, that removing your uterus hurts so much you end up sobbing and screaming” (122). The physical trauma is only superseded by the psychological trauma. Later, she is allowed to “see” the benign fibroid taken from her body. The story proceeds to stranger and darker physical and psychological territory when she arranges to have that fibroid reinserted into her body.
In “A Local Artist,” a couple decides to vacation in a town that has been forgotten since it is no longer on the stop of trains going to and from more populous areas. At first glance the story is a typical horror piece about a couple choosing a wrong destination. But with Enriquez the story becomes more of a commentary on cities and towns, mostly rural, that fade away and die when progress springs up around and isolates those towns into oblivion. The disappeared did not just happen to people in Argentina, it also happened to places, memories, and histories.
The twelve stories that make up A Sunny Place for Shady People are all deliciously compelling and attractive to those who are searching for a read that will test the limits of one’s sanity, both the characters’ and the reader’s. However, I do not wish to over psychoanalyze Enriquez’s writing or the minds of her readers. Instead, the stories in A Sunny Place for Shady People brings out what is best in world literature: the ability to describe different experiences without sacrificing what is essentially human. Her ability to write profound sentences, spin fabulous tales, all the while maintaining a readability is astounding.
And this is where her translator, Megan McDowell, comes in. As someone who cannot easily read Spanish, I find that McDowell’s translation is a gift, mesmerizing the reader and daring us to look away from the horrific accounts in the collection. Consider this sentence from the story “A Sunny Place for Shady People:” “I arrived on time to go back up to the Cecil’s roof and think once again about Richard Ramirez covered in blood, a demonic night predator with a demigod’s cheekbones” (52). It’s the last part of that sentence that, for this reader, rises above so many writers. It suggests to me that not only do angels and demons walk among us, but inhabit us, driving us in some bizarre odyssey for peace and solace.
Writing is a Faustian pact we make with the devil, only the devil turns out to be ourselves and the translator a Mephistopheles-like magician bringing our innermost thoughts and, in this case, deepest fears, across the frontier of language. Writers and translators are god-like in that they create worlds not only for their characters, but for readers to inhabit. A Sunny Place for Shady People is a collection of stories that stays with us, that we return to again and again, not to relive the dark magic, but to once again enter an experience with language that only reading can give us.
The magic of this book is in the telling, and the teller and her co-conspirator the translator, have us under the spell of literature from the very first words, chanted inside our heads in voices with both recognize and remain unrecognizable. Here is the first paragraph to the opening story, “My Sad Dead:”
First, I think, I should describe the neighborhood. Because the neighborhood is where my house is, and my house is where my mother is. You can’t understand one thing without the other. You can’t understand why I don’t leave. Because I could leave. I could leave tomorrow. (3)
The neighborhood is the collection of stories, and the relationship between daughter and mother in the story is language and feeling itself, wholly ontological and linguistic. Our stories come from a place of nurturing, a place of sheer fecundity and maternal warmth. These stories are not necessarily “feminist” as they are feminine in their realization. All the narrators, with one exception, are female, and those narrators are living in a hostile world, reacting to situations and circumstances that are inheritably and inherently threatening.
A Sunny Place for Shady People is an extraordinary collection that will further propel Mariana Enriquez’s reputation. Her talent is left without doubt through this collection, and I believe that she has now emerged as one of the most important and significant figures in contemporary world literature.
Enriquez, Mariana. A Sunny Place for Shady People: Stories. Translated by Megan McDowell. Hogarth, 2024.
Andrew Martino is dean of the Clarke Honors College at Salisbury University where he is also professor of English. He received his Ph.D. in comparative literature from Binghamton University (SUNY) in 2003. He has published on Roberto Bolaño, V.S. Naipaul, Natalia Ginzburg, Albert Camus, Paul Bowles, and others. Martino is a regular reviewer for World Literature Today and Reading in Translation.