Before I get back into the O.Henry stories, I wanted to whip out a quick post talking about a book I spent most of June reading. It's Our Share of Night (Nuestra Parte de Noche) by Mariana Enriquez. This will be a pretty light commentary compared to what I usually do, but I thought there were a few quick points worth making.
Background: the internet still sucks, and why it took me so long to read
I've been looking for jobs that involve using Spanish. Korean isn't terribly useful around here, but Spanish isn't. While I look, I'm also doing some volunteer work teaching English to Spanish-speaking immigrants. I thought I'd read a novel in Spanish to reinforce the other refresher work I've been doing. To choose a novel to read, I Googled this phrase:
"Las mejores novelas literarias de México de los 2020"
I discovered you had to specify "novelas literarias" because if you didn't, Google would think you meant a telenovela and give you information about that. The reason I asked for Mexican novels is because that's the main kind of Spanish of the people I work with. Well, actually, most are from Central America, but their Spanish is heavily influenced by Mexican Spanish, and I figured I'd have an easier time finding Mexican novels than Central American ones, so that's what I looked for.
At this point, AI hallucinated and told me that Nuestra Parte de Noche was a highly regarded Mexican novel of the 2020s. It is, in fact, neither Mexican nor from the 2020s. It's an Argentinian novel--something you can't miss from very early on--and it's from 2019. Not realizing this, I bought the book for Kindle and started reading it and was a few pages in before I realized what I had bought. For some reason, I decided to keep going.
Argentinian Spanish is its own beast, something the characters in the book allude to. It has a second person singular form that doesn't exist anywhere else, and it took me a while to get used to it. That's partly why it took me so long to read. Also, I was spending a lot of time applying for jobs and feeling stressed about it.
I don't usually write about literature that everyone else has read, because I like to fill niches that aren't already filled. You can easily go find dozens of decent analyses of this book online. All I'll offer here is a quick bit of apologia for the book to anyone who might have read it and wondered why everyone had such high praise for it when it could be mistaken for trash.
Why it's not sensationalist pulp
You might read this novel and be tempted to think it's just a really long pulp horror novel. At least one of the villains, Mercedes, is borderline cartoonish in her evil. There is also a lot of sex. Like, a lot of it. Not really a whole lot of sexual scenes in detail, but just a lot of sex happening casually. Hetero sex, homo sex, drugged-up sex, orgiastic sex, it's all there. Past this cursory consideration of the novel's content, though, there's a profound meditation on the loss that comes from political calamity.
The novel has countless people who are kidnapped and then used in ritual killings as part of a cult, or they are raised to become monsters like the "imbunche." This all takes place while in the background, Argentina lapses into a period of political tyranny where tens of thousands of people disappeared, taken by the government to languish in prisons, to be tortured, or to be killed. The period of the novel includes time before and after the military dictatorship, but because that is the period the novel begins in, it has more weight than the others.
It's impossible to write a novel that really gets at the heart of what it means for an entire generation of a country to be impacted by the trauma of having loved ones just go missing and never reappear. This novel comes close, though, and it does it by incorporating the magical and the occult and also through its epic scale.
There are two types of disappearances that take place in the novel. One is when the leaders of the cult kidnap people whom they suspect nobody will miss, either to sacrifice them to the darkness in cults or to raise them in cages to become monsters. The second type happens when the main characters discover an alternate dimension, one in which the darkness seems to live and to which the living sometimes find openings.
Having the cult be "real," meaning its dark god they revere can actually wound or even take the lives of those in its presence, has implications for the real-world dictatorship whose presence is always in the novel's background but never fully revealed. It has a different kind of effect than it would if, say, the members of the cult were insane and sacrificing people to a god who isn't real. That effect is to weaken the dictatorship, to rob it of its power and majesty and its self-importance. The dictatorship isn't the real power in the world of the story; they're just one more government of many, all of which are manipulated by the members of the cult. Moreover, the power of all governments is dwarfed by that of the dark god they unknowingly serve, a power that is at times in the novel equated with nature. The novel manages, therefore, to both take seriously the trauma of having had a loved one disappear but also to remove the feeling of dread seriousness with which a dictatorship much clothe itself in order to succeed.
Even the epic scale of the novel helps in this process of denying the military dictatorship this feeling of grandeur and self-importance. In the scope of history, the dictatorship was just a blip on the radar.
However, that blip continues to have devastating psychological consequences for those who lost someone to the dictatorship. Throughout all of the horrors of the novel, the story manages to carve out space for real pathos in its human characters living with the guilt and pain of having had a loved one just disappear. The chapter "The Problem with Empty Houses, Buenos Aires 1985-1986" is the best part of the novel, and it builds with slow and perfect timing to the loss that defines one of the central characters of the book. Themes dealing with generational trauma are perhaps a bit overdone these days, but "Our Share of Night" manages to reanimate these themes with new feeling precisely by decentering human psychological trauma at points in the novel. By making human loss and the whirling currents that spin out from it small in comparison with the cosmic powers that cause that loss, we are able to feel what it is that makes human experience of loss so painful: our rediscovery of how nearly complete our lack of power is. This lack of power comes in two varieties: the lack of political power among the weak in comparison to authority, but also the lack of power of all humans before forces greater than us all.
This second type of weakness has two sides to it, and the other edge of the sword means that the very political authorities who imagine they are strong when they manage, for a time, to wield that power, will end up feeling the sting of that reverse side when the power inevitably turns against them. In a sense, the novel is a more powerful dismissal of political power than Shelley's "Ozymandias," because for Enriquez's overturned cruel tyrants, there isn't even a "colossal wreck" remaining as testament to a fallen power. There is only the disappearance into the nothingness of history of those who once made others disappear.
