A SUNNY PLACE FOR SHADY PEOPLE By Mariana Enriquez, translated by Megan McDowell Granta/Paperback/272 pages/ $33.74 with GST **** W. Somerset Maugham's sardonic bon mot about the French Riviera, which provides the catchy title, might mislead some readers into expecting humour and comedy in this compact short story collection.
But there is very little that is laugh-out-loud funny about Argentinian writer Mariana Enriquez's dark tales, her third collection of grotesquerie after the International Booker prize-shortlisted The Dangers Of Smoking In Bed (2009) and Things We Lost In The Fire (2016).
Her matter-of-fact delivery instead doles out skin-crawling unease and psychological discomfort in unsettling scenarios. Those looking for cheap Halloween scares can also go elsewhere. Enriquez's horrors are mainly female-centric, rooted in domestic mundanity.
In the opening story My Sad Dead, for example, a female doctor hears her dead mother screaming in the morning: "Not the wee morning hours under cover of night but the full-on sunlight of day, so ill-suited to haunting."
This story is from the October 20, 2024 edition of The Straits Times.
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This story is from the October 20, 2024 edition of The Straits Times.
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