2024/003: Our Share of Night — Mariana Enríquez, translated by Megan McDowell

'There are parts of a lot of people here.' It wasn’t Adela who had said that, though someone had used her voice. Who was speaking through her? [p. 297]

This is a long and extraordinarily dense novel, sometimes rambling, sometimes horribly precise and specific: but at the heart is the relationship between Juan and his son Gaspar. Juan is a medium, the only person who can manifest the entity known as the Darkness. This appears as a 'black light' which can sever human flesh instantly and cleanly -- though not painlessly. It is worshipped and kept secret by the Order, an international occult conspiracy. The Order's wealthy leaders dwell in a remote corner of Argentina, complicit with the dictatorship which keeps them supplied with sacrificial victims. Juan's wife Rosario was killed by the Order: Juan expected to be able to speak to her ghost, but cannot. (I learnt that there's no word in Spanish for haunting, so he has to say it in English: 'not embrujar, not aparecer, it was haunt'.) The Order and Juan both believe that Gaspar has inherited Juan's gift: the Order want to ensure that they control the boy, and Juan will do anything to keep him safe and out of the Order's hands. Because the Order's plans for Gaspar (and for Juan) are too frightful to be countenanced.

Enríquez' horror often focusses on disassembled, dehumanised body parts (a severed arm, a row of torsos, a box full of eyelids) and I think that 'The Zañartú Pit' (a chapter focussing on an investigative journalist recording stories about the disappeared and about the excavation of a mass grave) helped me to think about that choice: about the appalling volume of human remains left by the dictatorship, about bodies left to rot into pieces rather than being given death rites, about the anonymity of bones and limbs and organs. In Our Share of Night, human life is very cheap -- and it is a commodity, a requirement for the rituals with the Darkness and for the oppression by the dictatorship.

I was reminded of Elizabeth Knox's Black Oxen, though that is set in an imaginary, and more Central than South American, country: the elements of the fantastic in that novel feel somehow safer because not rooted in reality and in the author's own experience.

Fulfils the ‘at least four different POV’ rubric of the 52 books in 2024 challenge. (Juan, Gaspar, Dr Bradford, Tali, Pablo ...)

Fulfils the ‘multiple timelines’ rubric of the Something Bookish Reading Challenge.