The Dangers of Smoking in Bed: Stories

"This is a collection of ghost stories. Enríquez uses the conventions of gothic horror and the macabre to write these brilliantly strange parables about the modern world. Her settings are detailed and concrete and realistic, mainly in Buenos Aires—she’s an Argentinian writer. She takes us into those settings, and we smell the smells, hear the roar of the traffic, see the streetlife. All the energy and human variety and dirt—lots of dirt—but with it a seductiveness and a kind of sexy vitality. All of that is pretty much realist, but then weird things start to happen. This isn’t horror for the sake of the thrill. I think every one of Enríquez’s fantasies of the unreal is a penetrating comment on the real world. Her imaginary world is one where people disappear, or are disappeared, as they have really been in Argentina. It’s a world where a daughter must go mad in order that another daughter in the same family can be sane. It’s a world where unloved children vanish—abducted, trafficked, murdered —and when they miraculously reappear, their families reject them for a second time. So these stories are very unsettling. But they’re also colourful and flamboyant, and sometimes disconcertingly funny, and always icily intelligent. They have the energy of ghosts that just won’t agree to be exorcised. Yes, I do. I mean, not for the writers’ sakes, but for ours. We, English-speaking readers, are so lucky to be given access to these amazing authors whom we don’t already know. We may be discovering them for the first time, but that’s a bit like Columbus ‘discovering’ America—it was always there. In the same way, most of these authors are already acclaimed in their home countries and cultures. So it’s not a question of conferring a favour on these already-great authors; I like to think that we judges are able to give English-speaking readers the great gift of being introduced to these amazing books."