International Booker finalist Mariana Enríquez, who specializes in gothic fiction and horror, makes her nonfiction debut with Somebody Is Walking on Your Grave (trans. by Megan McDowell; Hogarth, Sept.), a travelogue that takes readers to cemeteries and graveyards on four continents. Enríquez spoke with PW about shining a light on a dark subject.
What fascinates you about cemeteries?
When I was young, I went to cemeteries because I was being rebellious and edgy. As I grew up and grew as a writer, I realized that my interest has to do with the stories found in cemeteries—they’re places of art and beauty and have evolved with history. My childhood in Argentina coincided with a dictatorship that made a lot of people disappear; a lot of people don’t have graves. For my generation, a grave isn’t scary. It’s comforting. I went to the burial of the mother of a friend who was disappeared. Her bones were found in a mass grave. They did the burial 25 years after she had died. Visiting cemeteries for me is not about just being a flaneur or a morbid tourist. It has roots in something personal and historical.
Are there particular spots that stood out in your writing?
There’s an abandoned cemetery in Lima, Peru, that’s the most magnificent cemetery I’ve ever seen outside of a few in Italy. The guys working there made jokes, pulled skulls out of I don’t know where. The catacombs in Paris are underground. They used to be in the center of the city and now are in the outskirts; I learned about how bones are moved around. As a tourist attraction, it’s insane. There’s no elevator, and once you’re down there with the bones, you have to get out on your own.
Karl Marx is buried in Highgate in London. People leave flowers on his grave or people try to destroy it depending on the political climate. In that same cemetery, George Michael is buried—it’s next to Waterlow Park, where he used to cruise for lovers. It’s very sweet that he’s buried near where he had his pleasure in life.
What challenged you while writing?
The history of these spaces is not always obvious. Take two cemeteries—Cementerio de Martín Garcia in Argentina and Rottnest Island Cemetery in Western Australia. Both have areas for settlers that are quite pretty but very run-down. And then, they both have mass graves for the Indigenous and Aboriginal people. In Rottnest, it was a burial ground that had never been acknowledged before now. And for Martín Garcia, there isn’t detailed information—the Indigenous people are buried in an unmarked mass grave. Two different histories; two similar graveyards.
What do you hope readers take away?
Culturally, we all see death and the treatment of our dead in very different ways. Not everyone puts a cross in a field. For example, I have a friend from Turkey who’s Muslim. I sent him to Recoleta, a big aristocratic cemetery in Buenos Aires, and he came back appalled. The graveyards in his culture are different—much more modest. He was like, “That’s not death. That’s luxury and vanity.”
We’re in a moment when some people think that death only happens to other people—that if you have the means, you can live eternally; put your mind in a computer with artificial intelligence and prolong life. There’s something deeply inhuman in that. It’s important to realize that we end and that is not bad. That’s just how it is.
