THE DEEP ONES: "My Sad Dead" by Mariana Enriquez

"My Sad Dead" by Mariana Enriquez

Discussion begins December 27, 2023.

First published in the February 13th/20th 2023 issue of The New Yorker magazine.



BIBLIOGRAPHY

https://isfdb.org/cgi-bin/ea.cgi?265086

SELECTED PRINT VERSIONS

February 13th/20th issue of The New Yorker magazine.

ONLINE VERSIONS

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2023/02/13/my-sad-dead

ONLINE AUDIO VERSIONS

No online audio versions found to date.

MISCELLANY

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/21/special-series/mariana-enriquez-horror-litera...
https://www.newyorker.com/books/this-week-in-fiction/mariana-enriquez-02-13-23
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mariana_Enr%C3%ADquez
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2022/oct/01/mariana-enriquez-our-share-of-nigh...
http://tinyurl.com/yck63dnr

Presumably, there was an earlier publication in Spanish?

Anyway, I liked this, as I've liked almost everything by Enríquez I've read. Ghosts needing help to finish something before they can pass on is a common idea, but I don't recall having read anything else were they need some sort of continuous therapy before.

"My Sad Dead" wasn't in either of the two Enriquez short story collections. It was translated from a Spanish version, but I suspect that it saw its first publication in The New Yorker. Maybe the story and interview there were done specifically for the Our Share of Night press tour?

The idea of an "epidemic of ghosts" certainly fits in with the author's general idea of an Argentina haunted by its own horrifying political past. I love it when a really gifted author obsessively gnaws away at a theme over the course of a number of tales.

What really sticks with me after this one is the sequence in which the murdered teenage girls come to realize that they are dead. The final moments of their posthumous epiphany are indeed very sad:

"They wailed a little more when they saw the memorial and the police tape, but soon the moans faded to whimpers and hugs, self-pitying tears, until finally the girls, too, disappeared, or, more accurately, they dissolved. Their images evaporated into the air like alcohol."

The story is full of weird yet ethereally somber imagery, told in Enriquez's very distinctive voice.

There seem to be a couple of ways to interpret this story.

Is Emma gradually turning her back on the living to care for the dead? She talks about all the crime in the neighborhood but dismisses her neighbor's fear as "phobic fantasies". She suspects her ex-husband would like her near to him to deal with his new wife's troubled pregnancy, but she won't leave her home. She sees her daughter seldom. She seems to devote her energies to palliative measures for the dead, and those measures don't seem to permanently work.

Or are we to see Emma heroically as trying to undo the damage her neighborhood may be responsible for? Matias isn't given shelter. The dead girls either fraternized with a criminal or knew someone who did. Medical aid is not sought for the fallen thief.

I wondered to what extent Emma's attitudes reflect Enríquez's own. Emma's "phobic" neighbours don't come off looking good, but there's nothing in the story to suggest they're actually wrong to be afraid or wish for stricter policing.

Emma is right, though, about the US not being a safer country, at least as measured by homicide rate per capita. (Not that a relatively low national homicide rate is necessarily much comfort if your local rate is through the roof.)

You could construe her as caring more for the dead than the living, but I don't think we're supposed to see this as a bad thing. Remembering and honouring the dead seems to be important to Enríquez - perhaps not surprising considering she grew up in a country where the military government used to disappear people and dump their bodies in the South Atlantic.

In the story's setting of a small, traumatized neighborhood in a country which has itself been horribly traumatized, Emma is sought out by "hysterical" ghosts because she posseses a very powerful empathy battery. There might well be more people like her somewhere, maybe even closer than she might think, but that's not important to the story's situation, or to Emma. While her calling might be medical doctor, she's gradually finding out that her sense of duty to the dead is stronger than her sense of duty to the living. That seems to be helping her to pay off a kind of collective debt in a way that she is comfortable with. Her neighbors, on the other hand, aren't always so lucky.

>5 AndreasJ: A good point about Argentina perhaps honoring their dead more -- or, at least, differently -- than Americans.

Homocide rates can be misleading these days. In America, I suspect they would be much higher if not for the vast experience of America's emergency room doctors in major cities and, possibly, the medical lessons of America's wars since 2002. Homocides, in effect, were converted by improving medical care into "attempted murder" and assaults.

"My Sad Dead" will appear in Mariana's new story collection, A SUNNY PLACE FOR SHADY PEOPLE: Stories, translated by Megan McDowell, which Hogarth will publish on September 17, 2024.

https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/757704/a-sunny-place-for-shady-people-b...

>8 Debershoff:
Wow! Thanks for that heads up!!! Glad that Megan continues to translate.