Marie Arana and Writing Between Reality and Imagination

Seven Empty Houses

by Samanta Schweblin

This is a book that really confuses the place where reality and imagination meet. I am crazy about Schweblin. She’s an Argentinean living in Berlin, and she creates these incredible, ferocious, twisted stories about unstable minds, or minds that are quickly becoming unstable. There’s this kind of weird, perverse energy that she puts into her writing that I love.

She’s written so much—her most famous work is probably “Fever Dream,” which is a novel. But I really think of her as a master of the short story. She’s written a bunch of collections: “Mouthful of Birds,” “Good and Evil.” But this is the one I love best.

These are creepy stories, but for me, when I finish each one, I’m totally agog, because I realize that the creepiness is in my mind, as a reader. She does this to you. It’s kind of a magical thing. I reread these stories to get the flavor of her ability to manipulate a reader’s mind.

Now I Surrender

by Álvaro Enrigue

Enrigue, who is Mexican, is another favorite writer of mine. His writing is just so original and funny. For example, a previous book of his, “You Dreamed of Empires,” is about the conquest of Mexico, told from the point of view of Moctezuma while he is high on mushrooms. You’re careering down the halls of the city of Tenochtitlan, and you’re encountering the horrible smell of these conquistadores—it’s just absolutely hilarious. But at the same time it’s dead serious—so many of his books are about the culture shock of conquest, and what is in many ways the end of culture.

“Now I Surrender” was actually published in Spanish in 2018, but it only just came out in English. It’s about a group of Mexican military guys who try to rescue a woman who has been kidnapped by the Apache. At the time in which the book is set, Geronimo was the head of the Apache, so he’s a big figure in the book. But Enrigue also interweaves a contemporary story line about a cross-country road trip that he takes with his wife and kids, during which he’s trying to chase down the story of the Apache, and also fighting with his wife.

Some reviewers have called the book hallucinatory, but I think of it more as liminal, with Enrigue living between worlds—the worlds of the past and the present, but also of the real and the imagined. He’s trying to capture a real story from history, while his marriage is falling apart on the road. And, all the way through, he has no problem going back and forth between fiction and reality. ♦