He took Gaspar’s face in his hands, leaned down to look him in the eyes, and caressed his hair, the box on the ground between them, and he said, you have something of mine, I passed on something of me to you, and hopefully it isn’t cursed, I don’t know if I can leave you something that isn’t dirty, that isn’t dark, our share of night.
I haven’t read Mariana Enríquez before, so I went into Our Share of Night with no knowledge beyond her reputation for literary weirdness. I knew that this was technically a horror story (that cover!), and while it is that — with some seriously sick characters and graphic violence — I didn’t know that it’s also a savvy metaphor for the tumultuous recent history of Enríquez’s Argentina — with some seriously sick characters and graphic violence — and while it did feel overlong (my kindle app puts it at a thirteen hour read), it also felt like that length was making commentary on the banality and omnipresence of evil. I winced and harrumphed and sighed my way through this — and then I winced again, sighed some more — and any read that makes me feel so much, even so much negative, is worth four stars in my opinion (and especially when those negative feelings gave me a sense of Enríquez’s truth). (Note: I read an ARC through NetGalley and passages quoted may not be in their final forms.)
It was easy to get out of the city on a Sunday morning in January. Before he knew it the tall buildings were behind them, and then so were the low houses and tin lean-tos of the shantytowns on the city’s outskirts. And suddenly the trees of the countryside appeared. Gaspar was asleep by then, and Juan’s arm burned in the sun just like any regular father’s on a weekend of pools and picnics. But 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 recognized the danger: he couldn’t hide what he was. It wasn’t possible to hide something like that, at least not for long.
As the novel begins, it is 1981, Juan’s wife has been dead for six months, and he is taking their six-year-old son to visit his inlaws at their estate in the country. Hints are given that this is not a normal father-son relationship, and when they finally reach the estate after a couple of side trips, we see the full horror of what young Gaspar is heir to (kind of The Master and Margarita meets Rosemary’s Baby). An interlude from 1983 follows, and then there is another long section — set in Buenos Aires from 1985-86 — that sees Juan treat his son with both tenderness and brutality as his own health begins to fail, and as this section is from Gaspar’s POV, and he has been shielded from the reality of his family situation, his spooky adventures with his friends feels like a cross between It and House of Leaves. The next long section rewinds to Juan’s childhood and covers the years from 1960-76, introducing Gaspar’s mother and explaining how her relationship with Juan developed (and including some cool scenes set in Swinging London). There follows an interlude set in 1993 — in which a journalist is investigating a mass grave tied to a conflict between the Liberation Army and the Argentine army — and while this section ties the novel to its actual historical setting, the journalist will stumble upon some of the supernatural truths as well. Finally, the last long section — set in La Plata from 1987-97 — follows Gaspar as he grows from teenager to man, finding his place in the city’s art and punk scenes, discovering some of his own hidden talents, and watching as he retraces his childhood trip to his grandparents’ estate in search of answers (and while Gaspar and his family are not vampires in any sense, I got a real Interview with the Vampire vibe from this section.) Without wanting to give too much away, this is admittedly a lot of plot — this could easily have been sectioned off into a trilogy — but what really matters with Our Share of Night is how the supernatural events shine a light on Argentina’s actual history:
Florence didn’t tolerate that kind of rebellion. She had rocks tied to the woman’s feet, and she was thrown into the Paraná River. Let her join the many dead hidden along Argentine river bottoms. The dictatorship’s crimes were very useful to the Order, providing it with bodies, alibis, and currents of pain and fear — emotions that were easily manipulated.
It’s easy to imagine foreigners with hard cash becoming insanely rich with massive yerba mate plantations — essentially using slave and child labour to bring in the crops, cosying up to a corrupt government and using the army as personal security — so Enríquez’s tale of generations of one such family of powerbrokers, who use their riches in an occult quest for immortality (isn’t that what billionaires like Jeff Bezos and Peter Thiel are up to anyway?), make for perfect boogeymen. The quest for power everlasting push humans to the most heinous acts: Is there a real difference between a government disappearing dissenters and a mysterious sect hiding imbunche in a collapsed tunnel? A box full of human eyelids is unsettling in fiction, but is it more unsettling than learning that former Argentine president Juan Perón’s hands were, in fact, severed and stolen from his dead body despite his being “the most surveilled cadaver in the country”? I totally get what Enríquez was going for here, and as a political metaphor, this was an excellent read.
Ghosts are real. And the ones who come aren’t always the one you’ve called.
And on the other hand, if you’re looking for a ghost story, this feels long and often dull; punctuated by incredibly horrific scenes; perhaps, if you’re unlucky, too much like real life. Now I’m looking forward to Enríquez’s short fiction.
