Nightmares of Normalcy: Our Share of Night and the Affects of Fascism

[This short essay contains spoilers for the novel Our Share of Night by Mariana Enríquez.]

The elections of 2016 and 2024 had two similar features: both involved me waking up in the middle of the night, believing that everything that was happening was a dream. Derealization was a major feature of my life generally in 2016, and continues to show up in my life every now and then. But its appearance as we face another round of fascism, and as I read through Mariana Enríquez’s Our Share of Night for the second, the echoes of it in that book reminded me that it is also deeply entwined with fascism.

I first read Our Share of Nightem> in the summer of 2023, a different and yet not-that-different time from deep fall of 2024, when I returned to it. On my initial read, I was struck specifically by what I called the “real” violence–the section of the book spent on the mass graves in the aftermath of the Dirty War was the most “horrifying,” while the sections of the violence wrought by the cult felt less impactful to me at the time. Fittingly now, though, the section I found most gripping, that haunted me, was the first section, taking place in January 1981–in the last years of the dictatorship, but while it was ongoing.

What struck me about it this time was the distant, dreamlike quality of the day to day, how the time that Juan and his son Gaspar spend driving through the Argentinian countryside feels so deeply unreal. There are moments where the violence of what is to come makes itself felt, but the drive itself, their interactions with others, feel like a distant dream, or even nightmarish in their eerie adjacency to reality. By contrast, the violence of Juan’s possession and even the deeply disturbing violence against children and infants that his cruel mother-in-law inflicts to (uselessly) try to draw more power to herself feels more grounded in reality than a man driving with his child. And this, I think, is one of the brilliances of the book, the way its relationship to unreality, the deep and suffocating isolation and distance apart that perpetual violence begets, is connected to both the atmosphere (political, economic) and the characters themselves. For me, reading it mere weeks after the 2024 election, it had disturbing echoes of the way we walked around after the results–a deep unreality settling over me as I sat down to do my job, as I did my groceries. Only violence–the genocide in Palestine, the violence against queer and trans people–felt real, and even more real maybe was the anticipation of violence. The rest all fell away.

Our Share of Night is not a book about how to fight fascism–if anything, the embeddedness of its characters in the world of wealth and colonization mean there are no opportunities to really escape the suffocation of that world, and it troubles some areas of the text. A long stretch of the book (though not as long as I initially remembered) is spent with Rosario, Gaspar’s mother, born wealthy into the cult of violence that will consume her entire family, and I suspect this is where many people give up on the text. That portion, although important to the story of the novel, also seems almost wishy-washy about what it means to both be trapped by and benefit from violence. Rosario both participates in the violence and is a world apart from it, is a victim and an accomplice and almost willing to give up her own child in the name of power. And yet somehow this is also normalized; she is not vilified, but rather that fact is merely a point of conflict she has to discover in herself and carry on to the future. She is saved not by her own strength or sense of what is right–in fact, she is not saved at all, killed by her mother and the rest of the organization for her pursuit of power. And it is never clear in the text how strongly she holds to the agreement she makes with Juan that means she does not become her own mother–to not support transferring Juan’s consciousness into her own son’s body, to eradicate her son to prove that immortality is possible and to later let another soul be eradicated for her own preservation. It is hard, the text shows us, to completely decouple ourselves from the toxicity we are steeped in, even if at a distance we understand what they cost us and what they cost the world.

But then again, this retreat away from that cost is another affect of fascism (affect, of course, being a fancy way to describe “feelings” and also perhaps “vibes,” the way that feelings can exist in space and time as well as in our bodies/minds) We can wish for, and even take some action towards, a different way of being, a different future, and we can be ambivalent about what we would actually lose for that future, especially our proximity to wealth and power. That ambivalence can make us willing to risk some things or some people, and unwilling to take on much risk ourselves–and, as the book shows us, our willingness to stand with the oppressed will not save our lives. The book requires that we see that ambivalence in ourselves, and also does not require that we identify with it or disown it. It is possible, as Rosario’s family and the other families of the cult show us, to succeed in all political climates; as Rosaro’s father says, “Money is a country” (312). Wealth is a nation of its own, and Rosario’s understanding of the importance of her family exceeding their wealth fails to recognize that behind wealth in every case is violence, just as violence is behind the importance of her family in the cult they rule. (Yes I just finished volume I of Karl Marx’s Capital, more on that at a different time.)

As I pushed through the end of my reread, it occurred to me that for all that I had spent the last year and change chattering delightedly about the book with friend of the blog and frequent co-conspirator Andrew, I could not remember how it ended. It’s likely I will write endlessly about narrative catharsis on this blog, provided I can stop screaming about Jennifer's Body long enough to write, but of course there cannot be narrative catharsis in this world, not for Gaspar. The ending should almost feel disappointing–there isn’t much of a twist, and even the fitting together of the pieces fails to feel like a relief, if only because of the ruin that has already been enacted. So much must be lost to even strike a blow at fascism; so many do not survive intact, or at all. To win in this world is to collapse; to be drained, to be exhausted. There is no celebration at the end of your triumph, including the triumph of finishing a nearly 600 page book; there is just the world, continuing on, violence happening everywhere but maybe just a little bit less.

There is a grimness to the end that in describing maybe feels like I am trying to warn off another’s reading, and that’s not true at all (I have written about books I dislike before, at great length, but this is not one of those times!) Even without an ending that feels cathartic or even necessarily worth it, the way that the book conveys fascist feelings allowed me to link the nightmare of waking up twice to terrible electoral news to the nightmare of normalcy we’ve been living for a long time now. The question of what we are willing to lose lingers, and what we are willing to have taken from us (and how those are not the same thing.) Our Share of Night is not the rousing book to call you to action, but it felt useful in this moment precisely because of the way it rests so deeply in the affective world wrought by wealth and power that culminates in fascism, the way it manages to entwine derealization, isolation, ambivalence, and exhaustion throughout the book. Recognizing those emotions and the world that benefits from them does not necessarily lead to action, but it also means you can perhaps recognize their opposite, and seek out the world that leads to that.