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…

Contributor:

Darius Sobhani

Language:

Spanish

Places:

Writers:

Mariana Enriquez
Megan McDowell

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Every Tender Thing Breaks: A Review of Han Kang’s We Do Not Part

April 16, 2025 | in Reviews | by Ruwa Alhayek

It is not possible to move beyond atrocities when its perpetrators are unyielding, and when justice eludes us.

We Do Not Part by Han Kang, translated from the Korean by e. yaewon and Paige Aniyah Morris, Hogarth, 2025

Han Kang’s latest novel, We Do Not Part, translated from the Korean by e. yaewon and Paige Aniyah Morris, opens with a dream: Kyungha, a writer, sees thousands of black tree trunks of various heights protruding from the earth along a hill in front of her. As she walks closer, she wonders if they are gravestones. She thinks they look like thousands of men, women, and children huddling in the sparse snow coming down. Suddenly, she is wading through a body of water that gets deeper before she realizes she is at the shore and the sea is crashing in.

“When had everything begun to fall apart?” Kyungha asks herself. She thinks back to the two years before her book on the massacre in “G—” was published, when the nightmares began. Trying to shield her family–her daughter especially—from the worst of what had overwhelmed her inner world, she began to work on the book in an office 15 minutes away from her home. She tried to draw hard lines, to compartmentalize, to keep work and home as separate as possible. But sleep became impossible—days bled into nights, and nights bled into horrifying and disorienting nightmares. She hoped they might cease when the book was published, but we know now, in retrospect, that that did not happen. She is baffled by her early naivete: “having decided to write about mass killings and torture, how could I have so naively–brazenly–hoped to soon shirk off the agony of it, to so easily be bereft of its traces?”

Those violent traces have haunted her since, the dream recurring on and off in the four years since she began researching for the book. We learn that she and her friend Inseon, a documentary filmmaker and amateur woodworker, have agreed to work on a film recreating the dream. For a few years, they call each other to discuss the project, but never actually begin. Kyungha eventually tells Inseon she wants to abandon the project. They contact each other less and less frequently as time passes, and Inseon gets more and more preoccupied with the failing health and eventual death of her mother, a survivor of the midcentury massacre in Jeju. Kyungha is likewise miserable and alone. For years now, she has been dealing with episodes of debilitating migraines and abdominal pains, and has lost her job, her family, and almost all of her friends. She starts drafting her will but can’t think of one person to whom she can send it. She is barely nursing the will to live when she is roused—by a feeling of responsibility towards the person who will inevitably take up the work of executing her will after she dies—to resume living, at least long enough to get her affairs in order. “That is how death avoided me,” she tells the reader. READ MORE…

Contributor:

Ruwa Alhayek

Language:

Korean

Place:

South Korea

Writers:

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What’s New in Translation: September 2024

September 16, 2024 | in New in Translation, Reviews | by Christopher Higgs, Fani Avramopoulou, and Henry Gifford

Ten translated titles that hit the shelves this month!

When we first started the What’s New in Translation column in 2015, it was to offer readers a look at the incredible work done by writers, translators, and publishers all around the world. Gathering some of the most exciting publications coming out each month, the column featured regular reviews from trusted critical voices, giving the spotlight over to this great wealth of literary work. A lot has changed in the last decade; though English still reigns, we’ve seen the advocates of literary translation win a lot of battles as they seek to make our reading landscape a more various, inclusive, and interconnected space. As such, we now feel the need to extend our purview to include more of these brilliant voices, more of this innovative work, more of the insights and wonders that they bring. We are delighted to announce that our monthly column will now feature a greater number of titles —but with the same incisive critical insight that we’ve always aimed to bring.

From Argentinian horror to the latest from a Hungarian master of form, an intergenerational Greek tale to haiku interpretations, read below for a list of the ten most exciting books out in September.

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Documentary Poetry by Heimrad Bäcker, translated from the German by Patrick Greaney, Winter Editions, 2024

Review by Fani Avramopoulou

Documentary Poetry compiles a selection of German poet Heimrad Bäcker’s documentary poems and photographs with his published interviews, lectures, and essays, offering a richly contextualized introduction to his many decades of work documenting and reflecting on the Holocaust. Bäcker does not conceal his relation to the Nazi Party; he was an avid member for about a year, joining at the age of eighteen. He then denounced the Nazi ideology in the wake of the Nuremberg trials, and spent the rest of his life meticulously chronicling the Third Reich’s atrocities through photography and a poetic method he described as his “transcript system.” The collection’s title essay introduces what feels like the conceptual seed of Bäcker’s work: a reflection on the Nazis’ use of ordinary language to conceal, sanitize, enable, and systematize the horrors of the Holocaust. His conceptualization of language as a participatory, covert administrative tool of the Nazi ideological agenda leads to this development of the transcript system as a form of intervention—a way of undressing such language and purging it of its duplicities.