The Dangers of Smoking in Bed

Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of graphic violence and death.



Mariana Enriquez is one of Argentina’s best-known contemporary writers, and her work is emblematic of the so-called nueva narrativa argentina or Argentinian new wave. This type of literature is produced by writers born in the 1970s, during Argentina’s last military dictatorship that lasted from 1976 to 1983. During this time of state-sponsored terror, an estimated 30,000 people were disappeared by the government, which committed numerous human rights violations. Writers like Enriquez, Samanta Schweblin (the author of Fever Dream), Agustina Bazterrica (the author of Tender is the Flesh), Gabriela Cabezón Cámara (who wrote The Adventures of China Iron), Selva Almada, and Federico Falco grew up during the dictatorship and its immediate aftermath. Much of their work offers social and political commentary on contemporary Argentina, exploring themes of collective memory and trauma.

Argentina has always had a strong short story tradition as well as writers who are interested in incorporating the surreal and fantastic into their work. Jorge Luis Borges (author of the short story “The Aleph”) and Julio Cortázar (who wrote “Axolotl”) are two of Argentina’s most famous authors, and they almost exclusively wrote short fiction and were both known for their surrealism. Contemporary writers like Enriquez, Schweblin, and Bazterrica carry on this short story tradition as well as the tendency to slip elements of fantasy or horror into otherwise realistic fiction. This technique of combining fantasy and reality, particularly in the context of Latin American literature, is often called “magical realism” and was largely made famous by the Colombian writer and Nobel laureate Gabriel García Márquez. However, many contemporary Latin American writers resist the term, calling it “outdated” and complaining that it stereotypes and forces Latin American literature into “one single, lumpy category” (Moreno-Garcia, Silvia. “Saying Goodbye to Magical Realism.” The New York Times, 8 Dec. 2022). There are obvious aesthetic differences between the lush, allegorical works of classical magical realism like García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude or Isabel Allende’s House of the Spirits and the gritty, psychologically disturbing atmosphere of many contemporary Latin American writers like Enriquez, who cites most of her literary influences as coming out of the English-language gothic and horror traditions.

Although it is simplistic to lump decades of diverse Latin American literature under the category of “magical realism,” it can be argued that both classic and contemporary Latin American authors use supernatural elements in their writing for a similar end. In his Nobel acceptance speech, García Márquez famously described the “outsized reality” of Latin America and claimed that Latin American artists lacked “conventional means to render [their] lives believable” (García Márquez, Gabriel. “The Solitude of Latin America.” Nobel Lecture, 8 Dec. 1982). In the wake of colonization, Latin America was left with only a European “yardstick,” which could not begin to describe the complexity of Latin American reality. Therefore, techniques like magical realism are attempts to capture both the wonder and suffering of the continent. 

Decades later, Enriquez uses elements of horror and the supernatural in her writing with a similar effect. She describes discovering horror films and literature as a girl as finding a “language [… ] that allowed [her] to talk about the terrors [she has] known” (Enriquez, Mariana. “What Horror Means to Me.” The New York Times, 21 June 2023). She says it gave her a way to channel the very real fear that permeated Argentina during the bloody dictatorship of the 1970s and ’80s into her writing. She uses supernatural elements in her writing not to create fantasy stories, but to emphasize the real horrors of poverty, classism, economic instability, collective trauma, and gender-based violence.