Somebody Is Walking on Your Grave by Mariana Enríquez, translated from the Spanish by Megan McDowell, Hogarth, 2025
On a visit to St. Louis Cemetery No. 1, in New Orleans, the narrator of Mariana Enríquez’s Somebody Is Walking on Your Grave describes a particular site: ‘Another grave has a sign that says “Crime happened here” in red, but the story, which is detailed on the lower part of the sign, is illegible, washed away by the rain.’ With this image, the Argentinian author provides the perfect analogy for her approach in this most recent non-fiction. In historical and literary terms, a palimpsest is a manuscript page—typically made of parchment—that has been scraped clean to be reused for new writing. However, the original ink often left ghostly remains—faint traces of the earlier writing bleeding through the new surface. Just as a palimpsest may contain multiple eras of writing on a single sheet, the graveyard is a site where history is simultaneously layered and scraped away by neglect. Thus for Enríquez, the graveyard is the ultimate palimpsest: a site where the past remains waiting for a sensitive traveller to decipher its remnants, akin to a medium searching for spirits.
In summary, Somebody Is Walking on Your Grave is a compilation of personal anecdotes that take place in specific cemeteries, with chapters set in Georgia (the state), New Orleans, Paris, and Guadalajara, among others. These places become testing grounds for the notion of graveyard as palimpsest, a methodological effect winningly achieved through Enríquez’s standout narration, which reads as equally friendly and eccentric, with a bleakly comic outlook and a fascination with the supernatural, while also tinged with a hardened scepticism. She is not any mere tourist of the morbid, but someone with a deep, almost joyful affinity, for the macabre. This odd combination of credulity and cynicism is best illustrated in the chapter detailing her visit to the cemeteries of Savannah, Georgia. During a visit to Conrad Aiken’s grave, the narrator recounts the horrific predicament of his family—how he was orphaned as a toddler after his father murdered his mother and subsequently committed suicide—but frames it within a series of casual remarks. Rather than expounding at length on the gruesome story, Enríquez mentions the grave with a peripatetic levity, recounting it amongst the perceptions of other graves that she walks by, noting: ‘Aiken’s grave isn’t the only one with a bench—Johnny Mercer also invites you to sit down.’
Throughout her visitations, what becomes evident is Enríquez’s internal conflict between wanting to believe in the supernatural and her journalistic suspicions. She mocks the local commercialised ghost tours and their rather ridiculous characters—such as a guide who calls himself the ‘minister of stories’—but nevertheless, she cannot resist the temptation to join in. Such moments of self-aware ridicule give a dynamism to her voice, thereby giving a sense of spontaneity and discovery to the different graves she journeys through.
This layered personality helps anchor Enríquez’s fascination with graveyards. While in Guadalajara, she describes an almost ecstatic connection to the imagery of death, discovering that she was happy among ‘smiling skulls,’ with her husband sarcastically naming it her ‘lost paradise.’ Her obsession then reaches a peak in Paris when she steals a bone from the catacombs, which she names François:
François forces me to keep my arm bent. If I straightened it and François slipped out into the sidewalk on this hectic street, I would not only have disturbed his rest, but he would also be crushed! “I’ll take care of you,” I whisper to him. “You’re going to see the world. I bet you never saw it during your life, let alone in that beautiful but lonely tomb, with all the tourists speaking their own language and laughing and making your dream of other skies and other lives.”
Due to the narration’s effervescence, Enríquez’s accounts and descriptions of the graveyards eschew any rigid pattern. Instead, each chapter provides a vivid portrait of her presence. In the ‘untouchable zone’ of Chubut, where a cemetery for indigenous prisoners became a site layered with the trauma of the Conquest of the Desert, Enríquez is proliferate with details of the local history, but also provides the intimacy of a singular gaze: ‘Most of the older graves are in Welsh and have long epigraphs . . . and although I copy the epigraphs into a notebook, later on I can’t tell if my d’s are actually o’s or what; I spend a lot of time on that.’ In this, the book treats these sites as places where political and personal histories are overwritten but eventually unearthed by personal connection and curiosity; a friend’s mother had been buried there in Argentina, a victim of the country’s dictatorship whose remains were identified decades later. Fumbling as Enríquez may seem at times, she never looks away from such histories.
The central approach of the palimpsest reaches its peak in chapter four, ‘The Most Beautiful Cemetery in the World,’ centred on the Sara Braun Municipal Cemetery in Punta Arenas, Chile. Through the description of José Menéndez’s mausoleum (‘one of the richest men of this area’), Enríquez provides a wide-ranging history of the development of a business empire, including Menéndez’s links to colonialism and his role in the decimation of the indigenous Selk’nam population. It culminates, ultimately, in a list of contemporary Chilean corporations’ historical links to colonialism. With no shortage of erudition, she unearths such lingering traces, rather than merely documenting the spectacular monument. Deciphering how this bloody past continues to bleed into the present, the text suggests that the graveyard is never just a place of rest, but a site of overlapping, unquiet histories.
Yet, while this chapter serves as the strongest illustration of her thematic approach, it is also where the narrative feels most overbearing. Despite the obvious wealth of knowledge, the shift into an exhaustive account of contemporary Chilean neoliberalism can come across as overwhelming. In this instance, the desire to expose every layer of historical culpability is so dense that it risks drowning out the haunting, anecdotal atmosphere of the journey, trading hauntings for a ledger of data. It is worth mentioning because, crucially, Enríquez largely manages to avoid any dryness in her excavations, balancing the gothic with a dry, self-aware humour.
Because the collection does not follow any distinct plotline, besides being divided up into various places, the collection is occasionally uneven, with some vignettes lacking Enríquez’s signature atmosphere. In a chapter set in the Basque Country, the narrative feels somewhat out of place, shifting from the the investigation of the site to a logistical desperation. Her intense drive to reach the cemeteries—navigating slippery mud in the dark and risking arrest by the police—takes centre stage, leaving the actual location feeling secondary to her own obsession with completing her ‘mission.’ Despite including a concise history of a legion of British soldiers and their cemetery, the comedy of attempting to reach the destination outweighs any potentially profound or curious impressions on the reader.
Ultimately, Enríquez’s collection of cemetery pilgrimages asks the same uncomfortable questions that haunt the edges of our own lives: What survives when personal narrative is washed away by time and rain? The book does not merely document—it exhumes, observing death and its afterlives with a unique combination of spirituality and doubt. There is always a risk with macabre stories that they could end up being salacious or gratuitous, but Enríquez counters this with a sympathetic, even devoted awareness of the deceased. In her words, the dead are given something that resembles agency.
In an age of digital permanence, this fascination with the decaying and the forgotten stands out, enriching the current moment with the leftover aliveness that still circulate around us. Perhaps by travelling through these sites with Enríquez’s charming voice taking the lead, one will come away with a similar ideal of beauty, described in the book’s opening pages as ‘shadowy and pale and pliant, black-and-blue, a little moribund but happy, more dusk than night.’
Darius Sobhani has worked as a translator for multiple British and Spanish literature-based NGOs.
*****
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