Our Share of Night, by Mariana Enriquez

I want to drain your entrails with kisses.

One of the many, many enthusiastic blurbs for this book calls it a “once-in-a-lifetime reading experience.” And somewhere recently I read someone saying that the point of a book is not what you remember about it afterward but the experience you have while you’re reading it.

When I started it I felt unreasonably excited. Long works of literary fiction often rely on big sweeps of time or a self-conscious storytelling style or other techniques that create a feeling of over-stuffedness but don’t really alleviate the chore of actually reading the book.

This book, on the other hand, begins with a man who is caught up in a demonic cult, trying to save his young son from getting caught up too. You have the pleasure of trying to figure out exactly what’s going on, with the suspense of waiting to find out what’s going to happen. I was excited that it was a long book, because I knew the experience of being utterly engrossed was going to last. And I really wanted, as I always do when a book feels special, to talk about it to my friends and try to get them to read it.

But I’ve learned that I have to wait, because when I inevitably get disappointed before a book ends, I remember the book with a kind of resentment, and I regret having told everybody to read it before I knew exactly what I was recommending.

The problem with this book is that it’s about a demonic cult, who kidnap, torture, rape, and murder. Many of their victims are children. The supernatural figure they serve, and call a god, devours human beings body and soul and collects their body parts. The characters are broadly written, with much of the work of characterization done by describing what they look like. The good guys are magnificent specimens, the bad guys are ugly, and none of them are nice. Any involvement with the cult or the demon it serves disfigures the personalities of the novel’s heroes, and its villains are utterly evil sadists. The sadism and gore are easier to take because they really don’t feel real, but still, you’re spending 600 pages in a world where the author has expended tremendous power of imagination on a repellant creation. I thought about the book when I wasn’t actively reading it, and my thoughts, over this winter vacation, were all full of clotted blood.

I decided I would write about this anyway, even if I couldn’t recommend it, because the process of reading it and changing my mind about it seemed interesting. But then I also changed my mind about the book again. The book begins during Argentina’s military dictatorship, and the cult leaders, who are wealthy collaborators with the dictatorship, use political prisoners as human sacrifices. Late in the book, after many vivid descriptions of the demon’s collection of dead body parts, we come to a scene where a journalist is watching the excavation of a pit that was used during those years as a mass grave. And I felt a little different about the author’s expenditure of energy on her gruesome fantasy world.

So I guess, read it if you have a very high threshold for all the icky stuff I just mentioned. Two of the blurbs on the cover are from Kazuo Ishiguro and Joy Williams. And she quotes some great poetry. Here are the lines that serve as the epigraph to the second chapter. The whole thing, in Spanish, is here:

I want to drain your entrails with kisses

Exist inside you with all my senses

For I am a pitch-black toad with two wings.

—Baldomero Fernández Moreno, “Sonnet of Your Entrails”