THE DEEP ONES: "The Little Angel's Exhumation" by Mariana Enriquez

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THE DEEP ONES: "The Little Angel's Exhumation" by Mariana Enriquez

1gwendetenebre
Jun 10, 2024, 9:29 am

2gwendetenebre
Edited: Jun 12, 2024, 12:54 pm

I always enjoy the steady rhythms of Mariana's prose, no matter what awful thing she might be describing. This is one of her earlier tales, but even so, the power found in her later writing is still there. I found myself noticing the little, seemingly effortless things, like these few sentences that so vividly evoke the setting:

"We arrived at what used to be my house around four o'clock in the afternoon. Like always in the summer, the thick smell of the Riachuelo and gasoline on Avenida Mitre mingled with the smell of trash. We crossed the plaza, then walked by the Itoiz clinic where my grandma had died, and finally we walked around the Racing Club stadium. My house was two blocks past the stadium."

3AndreasJ
Jun 13, 2024, 9:48 am

As I noted when nominating this, Angelita is a similar sort of ghost to the ones in My Sad Dead.

A thought that struck me on re-reading: Angelita is following the narrator, and will apparently continue to do so. What after the latter's death? Will she find a new relative to haunt?

4gwendetenebre
Edited: Jun 13, 2024, 2:14 pm

>3 AndreasJ:

There is a similarity between the two stories.

The restless dead in Enriquez's work often seem to serve as "reminder" ghosts of forgotten - perhaps disappeared - people. But sometimes they seem to be responding to the guilt (or forsaken responsibility) of the haunted. Here, the narrator made the mistake of not gathering Angelita's remains when she should have, so she must continue to carry that weight even though she is sorry and has been forgiven. I think Angelita will simply fade into wherever (or forever) once the narrator eventually dies.

I should mention that Mariana's excellent debut novel, Our Share of Night, is full-on vengeful bruja demon-doom. Quite a different mode, but in her same voice.

5RandyStafford
Jun 15, 2024, 11:21 am

Since I like my ghosts unreasonable, I like this one. You find that sort of thing in some Japanese ghost stories and a story I still remember after all these years, George R. R. Martin's "Remembering Melody".

To the unreasonable ghost, Enriquez adds a particularly gruesome one that seems to be eroding away with time, so, perhaps, the narrator will be rid of this pest from beyond the grave.