Posts by Darius Sobhani

Graveyards as Palimpsests: A Review of Mariana Enríquez’s Somebody Is Walking on Your Grave

January 5, 2026  |  in Reviews  |  by Darius Sobhani

The book does not merely document—it exhumes, observing death and its afterlives with a unique combination of spirituality and doubt.

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.’ READ MORE…

The End Is Here: A Review of Into the Sun by C. F. Ramuz

October 29, 2025  |  in Reviews  |  by Darius Sobhani

Ramuz is less concerned with the mechanics of catastrophe than with the psychological and communal refusal to accept it.

Into the Sun by C. F. Ramuz, translated from the French by Olivia Baes and Emma Ramadan, New Directions, 2025

Originally published in 1922, C. F. Ramuz’s Into the Sun is a quietly devastating depiction of the climate crisis, centring its narrative around the predicted outcome of the sun eventually engulfing the Earth. Catastrophe narratives can lean into the dramatic, but among Into the Sun’s distinctive qualities is the resistance of hyperbolic description and genre conventions; instead, Ramuz’s novel is filled with clarifying depictions of manifold human reactions—particularly silence, denial, and the stubborn persistence of everyday life. The structure of the novel, too, defies expectation, being composed of a series of vignettes that do not necessarily follow a narrative thread. Rather, the discrete elements resemble individual short stories that share the same backdrop and quiet, elliptical narrative. The result of these stylistic combinations work to create a text that feels distinctly contemporary, given the current global concern for climate change and its repercussions.

Ramuz’s discreet, almost detached tone is evident from the novel’s early chapters: ‘Because of an accident within the gravitational system, the Earth is rapidly plunging into the sun.’ In presenting the facts with a clinical eye, the arrival of the central revelation is underplayed, only previously intimated via subtle mentions of rising temperatures. As the news then spreads globally, the small lakeside town in which the novel is set (unnamed, but clearly Swiss in its cultural references) carries on as if nothing has changed. The villagers hear the warning, but they do not believe it. According to the psychologist Matthew Adams, eco-anxiety can manifest in a variety of ways, including denial, and this tension between knowledge and enforced oblivion forms the emotional core of Into the Sun: Ramuz is less concerned with the mechanics of catastrophe than with the psychological and communal refusal to accept it. READ MORE…