Archive for May, 2023

Our Share of Night

May 24, 2023
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After two well received collections of short stories, it would be fair to say that Mariana Enriquez’s first novel to be translated into English (though the fourth she has written), Our Share of Night, was eagerly anticipated. This wasn’t just a novel, it was a 700-page novel, quite different from the short fiction with which she had made her name but retaining the same translator in Megan McDowell. Our Share of Night is not only epic in size but also in the story it tells, ranging from 1960 to 1997, and revealing the existence of an ‘Order’ which worships a monstrous, living Darkness and thinks nothing of torturing and murdering to pursue its aims. Similarities to life in Argentina during years of dictatorship have not been lost on either its local or international, audience. Enriquez is keen to point out that the horrors she describes did take place:

“…those things did happen here. Women had children in captivity and the children were stolen. They were torturing people next door to your house. They threw bodies into the ocean… Maybe I turn up the volume to 11 because of the genre I like to work in, but the genre puts a light on the real horror that gets lost in [a phrase like] ‘political violence’.”

The novel begins in January 1981 with Juan and his young son, Gaspar, leaving Buenos Aires. We recognise that Juan is unusual, not only from his frequent headaches and constant tiredness, but in his own admission:

“…he wasn’t a regular father, and people could tell just by looking into his eyes or by talking to him for a while. Somehow they recognised the danger: he couldn’t hide what he was.”

When he realises Gaspar possesses the same ability – at this point limited to seeing the dead – he describes it as an “inherited condemnation” and is determined that his son does not suffer “the terrors of his own childhood”. The one dead person Juan cannot summon, however, is his wife, and Gaspar’s mother, Rosario, killed in a road accident for which Juan holds the Order responsible. Despite this, he is headed to their compound; discovered as a child to have the power to summon the Darkness, this is a duty he must regularly perform, and the fate he wishes to save Gaspar from. The summoning is the centrepiece of the first part, Enriquez generally saving her best writing for the most horrific moments. The Darkness is presented as mindless cruelty rather than calculated evil, killing and maiming those who come to witness it:

“…the Darkness first sliced off his fingers, then his hand, and then, with a gluttonous and satisfied sound, took him all. The blood of the first bites spattered Juan, but he didn’t move now. He wasn’t going to move for a while, not until the darkness closed.”

We learn that summoning the Darkness also has a detrimental effect on the medium – Juan has already had a number of heart operations – and this adds a further layer of desperation to his attempts to protect his son. The Order, under the leadership of Rosario’s mother, Mercedes, are shown to be entirely without conscience in the pursuit of their aims, believing that the Darkness can bring them eternal life. The first section is followed by a briefer second part which ends with Juan’s doctor, Bradford, (who is also the narrator) being taken by the Darkness:

“I smell its glee mixed with the scent of my blood, while I watch as it eats my hands, my shoulders, attacks my sides, I remember how you told me once that the Darkness doesn’t understand, that it has no language, that it’s a savage or too-distant god.”

Readers, however, should not fear that the novel overflows with violence – as brutal and shocking as some scenes may be, they are relatively rare. Relationships are more important, and the third part, from 1985-86, focuses on the often-uncomfortable relationship between Gaspar and his father, as well as his introducing Gaspar’s schoolfriends: Pablo, Vicky and Adela. Juan’s ailing body, his fear for Gaspar, and his refusal to tell him anything about the Order, create a tension between them which only occasionally dissipates. Gaspar finds relief in the time he spends with his friends, who will also prove important to the novel’s plot, and if Part I’s set piece is the summoning of the Darkness, in Part III it is when Gaspar and his three closest friends enter a house which is believed to be haunted.

The fourth section marks a pause in the narrative as Enriquez focuses on world-building: not only do we see Juan, Rosario and other characters we have already met, in London in the 1960s, but we also discover the origins of the Order and the fates of previous mediums. Some of what we learn will be important to the novel’s conclusion, but this section can feel like a detour, especially as Enriquez gives the impression of being a little too in love with the time period (and the clearly detailed research she has done). It is also another section where the focus is on teenage characters and there is a sense throughout the novel that, as characters grow older, they become everything from less trustworthy to outright evil.

After a brief fifth section narrated by a journalist, Part VI returns to Gaspar and drives the novel to its conclusion in which (no surprise) Gaspar must face the Order. The novel’s threads tie together, and elements of every section align to create a satisfying conclusion. On its own terms, Our Share of Night is a brilliant example of the genre – Juan’s more complex character raising it above the black and white of good versus evil. As a response to the dictatorship its success is less certain – conspiracies and demons tend to obfuscate rather than shine a light on human evil. For horror aficionados, however, it is a must-read.

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The Investigation

May 19, 2023
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Stanislaw Lem is best known for his science fiction, but he also wrote in other genres, from the realism of Hospital of the Transfiguration to the autobiography of Highcastle. In The Investigation, first published in 1959 and translated into English by Adele Mileh in 1974, Lem turns to the crime genre. Lem sets his novel in England – his detective, Gregory, works for Scotland Yard – though the characters seem to drive American model cars (perhaps the translator’s work) and the police are routinely armed. The investigation is unusual in that all of the victims are already dead. Yet, despite this, their corpses are on the move, and there is very little in the way of evidence to suggest how or why:

“All the corpses disappeared at night, there was no evidence on the scene, no signs of forcible entry.”

After the latest incident, all roads were immediately closed and the area locked down, but no body was found. Only police consultant Dr Sciss seems to bring any insight into the events by “preparing a statistical breakdown of all the phenomena.” But how relevant are his measurements and observations? What should we make, for example, of the fact that an animal (“in two cases it was a cat and once it was a dog”) is spotted near the scene? As is often the case with Lem’s work, beneath the criminal investigation, a philosophical investigation is taking place, into the scientific method and the possibility that observations are created by the observer’s mind rather than what is being observed. This is demonstrated shortly after Gregory is assigned the investigation when he mistakes his reflection for a stranger:

“Unable to escape the disconcerting feeling that he was looking at someone else, Gregory stared at his own reflection for a moment.”

Later in the opening chapter he will chase, but fail to catch, an old man he first recognises on the Tube:

“The sleeping man was the subject of one of the posthumous photographs in his pocket.”

This also introduces a Kafkaesque atmosphere which sits alongside the police procedural, as, for example when the Chief Inspector Sheppard asks to see Gregory at his house:

“The hall was completely dark. Farther inside the house, a weak glow streaked the stairs in a trail of light, beckoning upward… Gregory noticed something staring at him from overhead – it was the skull of some kind of animal, its looming empty eye sockets clearly standing out from the yellowed bone.”

Sheppard also seems to have an uncanny ability to know where Gregory is, phoning him at a hotel and, later, at Sciss’ house. This is probably just as well as Gregory rarely goes near a police station, nor does he seem keen to work with others on the force. Gregory’s own lodging amount to a room he rents from an odd couple, the Fenshawes. Mrs Fenshawe spends her days cleaning the house from a stool, while Mr Fenshawe (“a melancholy man who, because his nose looked as if it had been borrowed from a different more fleshy face, gave the impression of being in disguise”) is silent all day and produces a “rhythmic knocking” all night.

Having been tasked with solving the case, Gregory is awoken by a call to tell him of a further incident in Pickering where a policeman (on guard at a mortuary) has been run over after running into the road in fright (Lem seems to have borrowed some placenames from Yorkshire, or imagined it was closer to London than it is). He discovers a body is missing and assumes this is what disturbed the constable, though he is too badly injured to be questioned. There are plenty of clues: footprints in the snow, a cat (but no paw prints), and the possibility the corpse could have been moved by river, but Gregory is no further forward. Sciss, using cancer statistics, proposes a microbe which can reanimate dead bodies; Gregory begins to suspect Sciss and follows him.

The Investigation has all the elements of a classic crime novel. There are clues, theories, interrogations, characters being chased and characters being watched, but Lem’s aim is not to tie everything up in a reader-pleasing bow. The case is closed when Sheppard proposes an entirely new version of events. “Is this true?” Gregory asks him:

“No… but it might be. Or, strictly speaking, it can become the truth.”

Aficionados of the genre may find this too much to take, but those who wish to have a little fun with it (yet with serious intent) will find this novel hard to resist.

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Seven Empty Houses

May 14, 2023
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Seven Empty Houses is Samanta Schweblin’s third, and most recent, collection of short stories, following her debut (still untranslated) El núcleo del disturbio in 2002 and Mouthful of Birds in 2009. As with all her previous work, it is translated into English by Megan McDowell. Schweblin’s great skill as a writer is to infect the ordinary with unease, and this is even more evident here where, as the title indicates, the setting is domestic: all seven stories have houses at their centre and use the most mundane objects and events to create a growing sense of horror without ever tipping over into that genre.

In the longest story, ‘Breath from the Depths’, a box of cocoa becomes an essential part of the story’s atmosphere. Although in the third person, the story is told from the point of view of Lola, a woman who no longer leaves the house and thinks only of dying.  The nature of her illness is vague, and her refusal to leave her home seems to be related to the shame associated with an incident in a supermarket when she fainted as much as it is with her problems with mobility. Her husband, who remains unnamed, is sent with a list for groceries but regularly returns with a box of cocoa which is not on the list:

“She never saw him use the powdered cocoa, really, she didn’t know how it ever ran out, but it was a subject she preferred not to ask about.”

The cocoa is a sign of her husband’s independence which she resents, an independence that increases when a family moves in next door:

“That night, Lola tried to talk to him, to make him understand the new problem that this move meant. They fought.”

Her husband befriends the family’s teenage son, who is a particular focus of Lola’s dislike. The story immerses the reader in Lola’s prejudice and paranoia while slowly revealing her back story and suggesting her unreliability as a ‘narrator’. Lola spends her time boxing up her belongings in preparation for her death; in ‘Two Square Feet’, the narrator and her husband have “boxed up the things we weren’t taking with us” before leaving Argentina for Spain where they are staying with her mother-in-law. Again, an ordinary object is prominent in the in the story as the narrator is sent out for aspirin by her husband’s mother despite being new to the area. She ends up in a subway station, remembering a her mother-in-law telling her about the time when she left her husband and:

“…she was sitting on two square feet, and that was all the space she took up in the world.”

She has a longing for the boxes in storage as she feels alienated from the new world around her in what is a powerful story about dislocation. In ‘An Unlucky Man’ a pair of child’s underpants play a key role in the story as the eight-year-old narrator finds herself without them, her father having used them as a ‘white flag’ to signal to other traffic that their journey is an emergency – her younger sister has drunk bleach, and they are on their way to hospital. While her parents are with her sister, a man in the waiting room starts talking to her and soon she tells him about her predicament:

“I don’t know why I said it. It’s just that it was my birthday and I wasn’t wearing underpants, and I couldn’t stop thinking about those circumstances.”

He takes her to a nearby supermarket to buy her new underpants, Schweblin masterfully building suspicion and unease in the reader through the innocence of the child narrator’s viewpoint. A similar juxtaposition of innocence and sexual fear is evident in ‘My Parents and My Children’. The story opens with the following question from the narrator’s ex-wife, and mother of his two children, Marga:

“Where are your parents’ clothes?”

When the children and grandparents go missing, Marga’s worry for the children is intensified by the strange behaviour of the grandparents:

“This is really bad. I mean, they could be doing anything.”

Eventually the police are called. Once again, the story benefits from the narration as the husband’s attempts to stay calm are overwhelmed by his ex-wife’s anxiety and anger. Of the other stories, ‘None of That’ tells of a mother and daughter who view the houses of the wealthy, correcting landscaping details. In the story the mother falls ill and they end up inside one of the homes – again, an ordinary object (a sugar bowl) is central. In ‘It Happens All the Time in This House’, the narrator tells us that the clothes of her neighbour’s dead son are regularly thrown into her yard by the wife and then collected by the husband. Death, and different generations, are also common to the stories – Lola, for example, also has a dead son. The final story, ‘Out’, is perhaps the most ambiguous, where the narrator, a young woman, leaves her flat wearing only a dressing gown and towel, her hair still wet – at no point in the story do we find out why.

Schweblin is a wonderful writer with such exquisite control of both voice and narrative. In all her stories there is a shadowy depth beneath the surface which may or may not hold horrors. Her ability to convey the anxiety of modern life is unsurpassed.

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The Spark

May 5, 2023
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The Spark and Other Stories was Elspeth Davie’s first collection of short stories, originally published in 1968. To say her work concentrates on the ordinary is almost an understatement – even the titles indicate as much: ‘Oven Gloves’, ‘The Eyelash’, ‘A Loaded Bag’. Photographs and film, perhaps still a novelty for many, feature in a number, beginning with the first story, ‘A Room of Photos’. Two young men wait for their photos to be developed, passing the time by looking at those displayed on the walls of the shop:

“Have you noticed this is how everyone looks at photos – this minute inspection that’s seldom given to paintings or even to flesh and blood persons…”

Such is Davie’s art – to look more closely at what is around us. In the story, the results are not uplifting as the men find only “the prevailing look – blank and glassy… Impenetrable boredom!” In the final story, ‘Camera’, there is a similar inability to reflect reality as Paxton attempts to film the elderly Mr Fendell, futilely instructing him to “Just be natural.” Only when he collapses and dies (in a way that also seems over-acted) can he be said to be ‘relaxed’. A photograph also features in ‘Removal’ where the central charter had developed a habit – an obsession even – of being present when a removal is taking place:

“The boy had to be there when the stuff spilled out. He liked to look through the uncurtained windows at the rooms emptying and whitening.”

As he wanders round one such house, he picks up a photograph of a young girl and, when he goes outside, is mistaken for a relative sent to close up the place. When an old woman criticises the family for spoiling the girl (“…the girl was actually given a harp!”) he defends her as if he knows her well, and soon develops a story of camping with her in the mountains of Switzerland. The boy’s imagination becomes somehow truer than the photograph.

Painting also features as an amateur artform in more than one story. In ‘Promise’ Carter is an “amateur of promise” whose success comes when he has the idea of sticking scraps of paper lying around his room onto his paintings. (Again, it feels as if Davie is hinting at her own process here as the discarded scraps of life are mixed with art). Only when he starts using banknotes, especially in a painting for his old school, does he encounter objections: “It’s a question of temptation.” Davie’s object does not seem to be satire; rather the ways in which art and reality coincide. ‘Space’ also features an artist and a meeting with an old school friend, Mullen, who notices the empty spaces in his paintings and considers them unfinished:

“I must beg your pardon. I was simply judging by man-in-the-street standards. Of course, it was the large spaces of untouched paper – those white patches, which led to the mistake.”

Mullen cannot unsee the white spaces (“The white spaces had expanded enormously”) and insists on buying the painting. Only once he has it in his possession, he “began to feel safe, and the fearful hollow inside him began to fill up as though he had already started on his solid meal.” (The juxtaposition of the existential ‘hollow’ with the prosaic ‘meal’ is very Davie). ‘Space’ is one of many examples of Davie using an object to reveal character. We see this again in ‘Oven Gloves’ when a husband fails to notice his wife’s new outfit. When he eventually spots her gloves (“Something different about them?”) she replies, “Different from the oven gloves you usually see me in?” Oven gloves, it transpires, was the annual Christmas gift from her mother-in-law. Eventually she goes to a neighbour to have her new outfit admired. In ‘The Eyelash’ the offending object is found on the edge if a plate in a restaurant: “I feel rather disgusted,” the diner, a young woman, declares. A conversation ensues between her and her boyfriend which soon ranges beyond the incident:

“I think the disgust or disappointment or whatever it was came a long, long time before that.”

Soon the couple have left their friends behind to finish their meal, underlying tensions revealed though nothing you might call an argument taking place. ‘The Eyelash’ is one of the shorter stories, and Davie can observe and reveal over a few pages as skilfully as she does on the longer pieces. On the one hand the very ordinariness of her charters and situations demonstrate why she has been largely forgotten, yet they are her great strength rather than a weakness.

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