Life
Argentine writer Mariana Enríquez, who has swapped the chaos of Buenos Aires for the calm of Launceston, reflects on the closeness of horror and humour. By Konrad Muller.
Argentine author Mariana Enríquez’s new life in Tasmania
Mariana Enríquez is in Tasmania. Not passing through, not visiting – no, the uncrowned queen of Latin American literary horror and black fairytales for adults has quit her heaving home town of Buenos Aires and relocated, with her cats and her husband, to Launceston. On an August morning of steely skies, up a narrow garden path I come, to her new house, to ask why?
The house is a yawning weatherboard affair perched like a shipwrecked vessel on a hillside in the suburb of Trevallyn. That name feels significant – an echo of the beautiful town in Patagonia that was famously founded by Welsh migrants to Argentina. Also significant, surely, is the gothic name of the house, Winterbrook, inscribed on a plaque by the front door. No light shines from within. The sepulchral houses in Enríquez’s fiction consort with torture, with insidious deaths and disappearances – so it is with some trepidation I knock.
Fortunately, Enríquez herself welcomes me: a small woman in a red jumper, with intense dark eyes, a quizzical glance and a slight smile. She introduces me to her husband, Paul, who is setting up the family’s voodoo shrine, and their cats, Djokovic and Christie (the latter is named after a song by the Dirty Three). Inside, everything is still in flux. Their possessions have recently arrived and the corridor Enríquez leads me down, bathed in dimness, has shelves and shelves of half-unpacked books. I ask how many she brought.
“Five thousand,” she says.
“Did you cull?”
“One thousand.”
“Any big names?”
“Thomas Pynchon, Jane Austen.”
“Jane Austen?” I protest.
“I can’t stand that woman,” Enríquez says. “The mating rituals of the British. I really don’t care for the mating rituals of the British.”
Enríquez parks me at a small wooden table in a living room, floating on temporary furniture. She serves me English breakfast tea (“It’s all I’ve got, sorry”) and a slice of mince tart that will remain untouched over the next few hours, as I’m locked into the roller-coaster conversation that ensues. It covers everything from the cremated remains of her cat Emily (after Brontë) – I am shown the box – and her tough-girl literary personas, to absent friends in Argentina and the literary exemplar that is Stephen King (“a writer ‘serious writers’ do not read”).
I know I must ask Enríquez about her voluntary exile in Tasmania, but first I hazard a question about dentistry. Does she really think dentistry students are “soulless and stupid people, ignoramuses who think only about money and are steeped in bad taste and sadism”? The allusion is to her fine short story “No Flesh Over Our Bones” in the crackling collection Things We Lost in the Fire.
“That’s a joke of course,” Enríquez replies, and then adds with that slight smile, “I also don’t like feet. Dentists and podiatrists. They both have some kind of perversion. It’s okay, because it’s a perversion that we need.”
I put it to her that her short stories often revel in a comedy of the extreme, that hers is a Swiftian black humour of exaggeration and mock misanthropy, which gets lost in all the solemn fuss over her excursions into supernatural horror.
“Horror and humour are actually very close,” she reflects, “because of their hyperbolic nature. Humour works by voicing the unvoiced; people laughing at prejudices finally being exposed. Horror, too, works by exposing the darkness of our unspoken fears.”
Here Enríquez’s husband drifts past, with earbuds in, bearing a vacuum cleaner. She has told me how they met. Originally from Western Australia, Paul spent six years cycling around the world to raise awareness about the debt crisis of the global south. He came through Buenos Aires, and Mariana, normally a rock’n’roll journalist, was dispatched to interview him. This was 20 years ago.
“We didn’t need too much awareness-raising about debt in Argentina,” she remarks. “But we had a fling, which became serious.”
Not long after, both still in their “punk phase”, they were married under a concrete highway overpass in Buenos Aires, with the traffic overhead going “whoosh-voom, whoosh-voom”, like background Metallica. They had lived in that city ever since.
I ask her why, then, she decided to emigrate.
Enríquez clutches her brow, then says it’s to do with life’s practicalities. Buenos Aires is interesting and fun but exceedingly difficult.
“The inflation is terrible; the insecurity is terrible; everything changes all the time. I would like to live somewhere that’s safe – not violent – where the electricity works and there’s a decent health system.”
Also, it is only fair, she says: Paul lived in Buenos Aires for 17 years. It was he who discovered the house in Tasmania. “I have found you a Trevelin on the other side of the world,” he announced.
So much of Mariana Enríquez’s finest writing anchors the occult and the supernatural in the grim realities of the modern Argentine situation, in the seeping violence and ghosts of the dictatorship, the disappearances that haunted her childhood, and the economic wreckage and desperation – the slow death of the middle class – that has followed since. I think of her disturbing story “Kids Who Come Back”, from her first collection, The Dangers of Smoking in Bed, which was shortlisted for the International Booker Prize. It is an allegory about the children of the disappeared who were kidnapped under the generals during the Dirty War of the 1970s and ’80s.
Another story, the bitterly funny “Spiderweb”, laughs at a useless, conceited, boorish male partner and has particular resonance in a country where femicide and misogyny are a national scandal. Is Enríquez concerned she will lose her creative stimulus by leaving Argentina?
“That is a question for later,” she says. “For now, I have projects enough to keep me going and I will visit Argentina every year.”
Enríquez has already drawn inspiration from outside her native country. Her new volume, Someone Is Walking On Your Grave: My Cemetery Journeys, is a work of literary nonfiction chronicling the author’s devotional visits to storied cemeteries around the world. She describes Staglieno in Genoa, the site of the cover art for Joy Division’s “Love Will Tear Us Apart”, and the Paris Catacombs where she steals a bone of uncertain anatomy and christens it “François”, after Rabelais. She calls this her “necro tourism” – an obsession that goes back decades.
She describes this, the latest of her books to appear in English (it was published in Spanish in 2014), as “amateurish anthropology, an impressionistic travel book, to be dipped into, not necessarily read cover to cover”. This is not entirely true. Someone Is Walking On Your Grave is a fascinating adjunct to the fiction, a sort of album to Enríquez’s sentimental education. Cemeteries become a gateway to her intellectual and emotional hinterland – to her view of history as atrocity, searingly recorded in visits to the Aboriginal prisoner cemetery on Rottnest Island and corresponding sites near Tierra del Fuego, where the indigenous peoples were almost obliterated. They also lead the reader to her perennial fascination with the irrational, with folk wisdom and hauntings, vampires and seances, stolen bones that talk.
“Reality without the irrational doesn’t work for me,” Enríquez says. “I spent my younger years doing cocaine and the ouija board. For me, a fantastic combination.”
This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on August 30, 2025 as "The writer’s retreat".
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