Mariana Enriquez

 

They Toss Bodies at You: On Mariana Enríquez’s “Our Share of Night”

By Elizabeth Gonzalez James

February 6, 2023

“TE TIRAN MUERTOS,” Mariana Enríquez writes in Our Share of Night, the hotly anticipated English translation of her 2019 Spanish-language novel. “In Argentina, they toss bodies at you.” This arresting line comes near the end of the almost 600-page novel, as a character grapples with having discovered that a loved one was kidnapped and tortured, their chest split open and a child’s severed arm sewn up inside. I begin my review with this image not to shock, but rather to prepare you for the world we are about to enter, not unlike the sign hung above Dante’s gates of Hell: “Abandon hope, all ye who enter here.”