Somebody Is Walking On Your Grave by Mariana Enriquez
The first non-fiction book from acclaimed Argentine author Mariana Enriquez is an examination of the cultural residue of graveyards
Blending memoir, travelogue and peculiar little histories, Somebody is Walking on Your Grave is a series of essays paying homage to Mariana Enriquez' love of cemeteries. From Aboriginal graves in Australia to Parisian catacombs beneath Montparnasse, the author takes readers on a whistle-stop necro-tour of famous graveyards.
In her first work of non-fiction, the journalist and novelist visits burial sites of figures both famous (take Karl Marx’s London grave, where the author’s favourite band inspires her to pose in a leopard skin coat) and unknown to interrogate our complex and changing relationship with our local dead. As we follow Enriquez through young love and a lifetime affinity for punk rock, the author weaves her own life into the deaths of others, interrogating the complex role cemeteries play in our sociopolitical lives through violent residues of colonialism and dictatorships. Enriquez unabashedly courts the Gothic; this is a quietly introspective and odd book full of dark romanticism, teasing the reader in a kind of danse macabre. Somebody is Walking on Your Grave is a reminder of the omnipresence and inevitability of death, and while it can at times verge uncomfortably close to the death-fetishistic, it is a fascinating and provocative rendering of the stories of the dead and those who tend to them. This book will make you pay a renewed attention to any taken-for-granted graveyards on your local commute.
