The recent news about the winner of the Commonwealth Short Story Prize being AI generated—or indistinguishable from such—reminded me of the million-and-one critiques of the MFA novel and, similarly, the contemporary prestige approach to magical realism.
What was once a radical aspect of magical realism—its ability to destabilize rational bourgeois realism and reveal the absurdity of colonial modernity—has too often become a style for a globalized cosmopolitan liberalism where literal ghosts transparently represent metaphorical ghosts. Even novels from the developed world now use the language of ancestral memory, inherited trauma, spectral pasts, and mythic decay (interesting ideas rendered trite by 100 Years of Solitude, Pedro Páramo, and other greats).
My objection isn't to fantasy or symbolism, but rather with the sense that these works are almost pre-interpreted: the supernatural is treated as proof the novel understands globalist contemporaneity rather than as an intrusion into reality.
Our Share of Night, as an accessible literary gothic horror provides an unlikely refuge. Enriquez, consciously or unconsciously, replaces the genre’s usual melancholy lyricism with bodily, classed, political horror. The supernatural is obscene and sadistic, destroying characters rather than conferring ancestral wisdom.
The novel's occult order is wealthy and transnational, definitionally a better representation of the contemporary global order than tasteful and artistic symbolism. Power is material, explorations should be too.
A dictatorship—the novel is set in Argentina from 1960 to 2000—isn't curated and therapeutically-addressed trauma, there is no ennobling suffering, and no great truths are revealed. It's a horror story; the characters are exhausted and endangered. Political evil is not mysterious because it is symbolic, but because it is systematic and ordinary.
Stylistically, the translation resists the polished international-house style, the hallmark of MFAs and ChatGPT. Enriquez’s prose can be excessive, lurid, ugly, abrupt. The book sprawls.
Most crucially of all, the supernatural in Our Share of Night interrupts reality. The occult is not reducible to metaphor, and Enriquez is intelligent enough not to flatten it into one. The heart of the darkness is fundamentally unknowable since systems of domination defy rational comprehension, especially from within and below. But, even still, irrationality, whether the supernatural or the political, can be organized. If anything, the novel suggests that power survives precisely by incorporating bodies, memory, and belief into its own perpetuation.
In that sense, I read Our Share of Night as a repudiation of what magical realism became after its institutionalization. It remembers that the fantastic should destabilize the reader. After all, horror begins where explanation and convention end.