“There’s something about the scale of the cruelty in political violence from the state that always seems like the blackest magic to me, like they have to satisfy some ravenous and ancient god that demands not only bodies, but needs to be fed their suffering as well,” in the words of the Argentine writer Mariana Enríquez. “Black magic” is certainly an apposite description of the short stories of her literary forebear, Silvina Ocampo, subject of Enríquez’s 2018 biography, Little Sister.
Ocampo (1903-1993) lived through the military dictatorship that ruled Argentina from 1976 to 1983. Her extreme fiction was dismissed as excessively cruel by her friend Jorge Luis Borges, and by Argentina’s literary establishment, but has since proved a guiding light for writers of Enríquez’s generation, who are often grouped together under the wider umbrella of “Latin American Gothic”, and are now examining the nightmare of the “Dirty War” in genres such as horror.
Ocampo was born into the Argentine aristocracy and became a member of the literary elite orbiting around Borges, but was in some ways an outsider artist, partly because of her gender. The black satire of her stories, which spares almost no one, springs from this odd insider/outsider status. Almost all of her stories are written from a child’s point of view, a classic horror device that allows her to probe her country’s psyche with an uncanny audacity.
The Impostor and Other Stories, a new collection, spans the late 1930s to the late 1980s. From the title story onwards, the reader is plunged into a freaky universe of derangement, the shattering and burden of memory, houses haunted by previous inhabitants, child abuse and child murder, ritual killing, homicidal and suicidal children, rape, zoophilia and saucer-eyed foreboding.
In a very modern way, and akin to uncompromising recent avant-garde films such as The White Ribbon, The Childhood of a Leader and The Painted Bird, children here are not only victims but perpetrators of evil, depicted with a cackling frivolity. Many of the tales are brutally short and purposefully ambiguous.
