Darker patterns
Tertulia, vol. 38
Hola. It’s Barbara here, your curator of cultural news from the Spanish-speaking world. This week I finally review Mariana Enríquez’s thriller Nuestra parte de noche, which I read over the summer, I recommend a podcast episode about the gentrification taking place in Puerto Rico, and - with great lament- have to share some very sad news with you.
Mariana Enríquez, Nuestra parte de noche (2019, Our share of night)
Over the summer, I read this novel by Argentinian journalist and author Mariana Enríquez. The book tells the story of Juan Peterson and his son Gaspar. Juan has been exploited by a sect («la Orden»), a death cult which is led by some wealthy families of Argentina’s agrobusiness elite. Juan has supernatural powers and is able to have conversations with the dead. These conversations happen during horrific rituals where some members of the sect disappear, are dismembered or executed. These members are understood as sacrifices to the “Darkness” («la Oscuridad»).
When a member of the cult discovers Juan’s supernatural talents as a child, they take him away from his own family and convert him into their «medium». Since Juan has a life-threatening heart disease and won’t survive for much longer, the leaders of the sect are eager to find a successor for him. They hope that Juan’s son Gaspar may be their future medium that is able to bring them even closer to the power of darkness and the promise of immortality. As long as they are able to stay in contact with the darkness, the sect will prevail. Big part of the book focuses on Juan’s intentions to save Gaspar from becoming the new medium. His means are not always those that we commonly associate with a caring father.
Horror thrillers are not my genre and some scenes are really drastic and graphic. I do not need such an overload of ugly violence when I read. I prefer the subtler psychological horror of writers, such as Samantha Schweblin. It is Enríquez’s debut novel and I cannot compare the novel to her short fiction which she published before. I only knew her because of the biography she had written about Silvina Ocampo. Despite the violence I was fascinated by some of the characters. I especially liked how Enríquez developed the storyline around the complicated relationship between Juan and Gaspar on the one hand, and Gaspar and his childhood friends on the other hand. I found the part narrated by Juan’s wife Rosario (which takes place in London) lengthy in comparison. I also believe that the final parts which try to establish coherence by bringing the various storylines together are somewhat traditional and also predictable. The weirdness of her fiction rather lies in the selection of her topics than in her way of writing.
The novel uses some features that are typical of magical realism and I am not sure if it is intentional mockery or epigonous writing. The book has the typical composition of a family saga that spans several generations and takes place on two continents. We get to know the situation through various narrative voices. The novel als depicts the stereotypical contrast between the civilised urban centres (even though in these metropolitan areas, there is always a haunted house with dark powers somewhere, be it in London or in Buenos Aires) and the wild landscapes of the Latin American countryside, where dark magic seems to reign beneath the surface of European-style country estates. Yet, when Enríquez introduces the reader to the belief systems and idols of the indigenous population and the magic landscapes of the triple border region, where the rivers Iguazú and Paraná converge, she does not do it by naturally integrating it into the plot. On the contrary, we mainly get to know this magic indirectly through the academic lens of Juan’s wife Rosario, an anthropologist trained at Cambridge, and the journalist Olga Gallardo who investigates the murders committed there by the military regime of the 80’s.
To put it in a nutshell: Despite an overdose of graphic violence and some weaknesses in the narrative structure, I can recommend the book. It is not for the faint-hearted though.
The gentrification of Puerto Rico
Like many other tourist destinations Puerto Rico is confronted with a complex problem: Many apartments in central locations are getting sold to professional investors who renovate them and rent them out to well-paying tourists. What we have seen in cities like Berlin, Barcelona and Lisbon, has also reached the Caribbean island of Puerto Rico. I have never been to the island, but a very dear friend of mine from Houston was born in San Juan and I have always wanted to go there with her. For many tourists from the U.S., it is the safest and shortest trip to spend some sunny days on a tropical island.
This development has a tremendous effect on the local population. The boom in foreign investment in Puerto Rico has caused housing prices to skyrocket and made the island less and less habitable for Puerto Ricans. Many Puerto Ricans can no longer afford homes where they used to live. The podcast El hilo talks to a lawyer, an economist and a social worker about the current real estate situation on the island and what it means for Puerto Ricans. You can listen to the podcast episode «Puerto Rico - desplazados por el turismo», very informative.
Obituary: Moris Albahari (1930-2022)
Moris Albahari, a holocaust survivor from Sarajevo and one of the last speakers of Ladino in Bosnia, passed away on October 22nd. Bryan Kirschen, who - together with Susanna Zaraysky - had featured him in a documentary from 2015, spread the sad news on Twitter.
I recommended the documentary Saved by language in one of my earlier newsletters. May Moris rest in peace. Or in Ladino: «Ke su alma repoze en ganeden».
This is almost all from me this time. I have one more thing, a song recommendation for you from Colombia. While we are all asked to save a little bit of energy and electricity at home, people on the Colombian Pacific Coast do not have a reliable power supply at all (much less do they have drinkable water in one of the world’s most rainy areas). The situation in the Pacific has led many artists to make protest songs. This is also the case of La Luz, a single made by Carlos Yahanny Valencia Ortiz, better known as «Tostao», ex-member of Chocquibtown, and the group Los Dioses del Ritmo, made up of «Luigy Boy» and «Meaya». They got famous thanks to TikTok, but I got to know them through a tweet by author and activist Velia Vidal.
Come back to my site in about two weeks time to find more news from the Spanish-speaking cultures. Let me know what you’d like to read about.