Review of Mariana Enriquez’s Somebody’s Walking on Your Grave, translated by Megan McDowell

Mariana Enriquez wasn’t always a taphophile (someone who tours cemeteries for pleasure), though she prefers the term “cemetery connoisseur”. Her love for them began at the Monumental Cemetery of Staglieno in 1997, during a Europe tour with her mother. Genoa wasn’t even one of the cities she was looking forward to, but once it was added to the itinerary, the famed cemetery became a “brooding obsession”.

In her debut non-fiction collection, Somebody’s Walking On Your Grave: My Cemetery Journeys, translated by Megan McDowell, Enriquez takes us along on personal tours of 21 cemeteries. Cemeteries provide no dearth of stories and personalities — big and small, horrific and mundane, salacious and serene, haunted and mysterious, personal and communal — and these essays showcase a sweeping breadth of this range.

Crooked crosses

There are interesting tidbits about the Welsh colonies in the Andes and Argentine Patagonia, one of which includes a famous horse with his own burial place (Malacara, literally Long Face, saved his rider, a John Daniel Evans, whose family would end up being key to Argentina retaining Patagonia, and not conceding it to Chile). She writes about how a group of soldiers from Guernsey ended up buried on Mount Urgull in Basque Country’s San Sebastian.

In western Australia’s Rottnest Island, she makes a poignant visit to a place once inhabited by the Noongar Aboriginal people, later used as a prison for captive natives, including children, and now home to one of the country’s largest indigenous burial grounds. At Martin Garcia Island Cemetery in Argentina’s Buenos Aires province, many of the crosses are crooked. A reason given is a defective mould, but there are crosses from the same period without the slant, so what does this mean about the graves they mark?

Walking over the dead

There are visits to Savannah, Georgia, where she realises that since all cemeteries were nomadic in the 19th century, we’re always walking over the dead; and to Louisiana’s New Orleans, which houses 42 cemeteries featuring niches, vaults, and mausoleums. There are no burials here, bar the cemetery for the indigent, poorest citizens of the city, because the city is built on swampy ground.

Trips to popular cemeteries like Highgate in London, Edinburgh’s Greyfriars Kirkyard, and the Montparnasse Cemetery and Catacombs in Paris (where Enriquez controversially steals a bone as a souvenir!) nudge shoulders with the Old Jewish Cemetery and the Vysehrad Cemetery in Prague.

These essays, organised somewhat but not always thematically, jump between continents and decades, sometimes lingering at length, other times flitting through in short bursts. This makes for a varied reading experience, almost like choosing candy from a pick-and-mix bag you’ve been handed by someone else. You love a few, others are enjoyable enough, others yet aren’t to your taste — there’s something for everyone, even if you’re not a fan of the macabre or hauntology.

A lot of this wide-reaching appeal is down to how Enriquez blends reportage, memoir, travelogue, culture, literature, architecture, art, politics, and music. The references can often be niche, but the author’s enthusiasm makes up for the gap in the reader’s knowledge — a depth that goes beyond the aesthetic appeal of the gothic and uses each cemetery as a lens to investigate history, to interrogate death, and to learn about life.

Enriquez recently told NPR that she grew up in the 1970s, at a time when Argentina’s dictatorship made many bodies disappear, often buried in some common, untraceable grave. So, she realised that a tombstone, a final resting place, is comforting in a good way. “Where the name and the date remain, a voice that says: I was here, now I’m gone. Maybe no one knows my name any more, but someday someone will remember me.”

The reviewer is a Mumbai-based author and editor.

Somebody’s Walking On Your Grave: My Cemetery Journeys

Mariana Enriquez, trs. Megan McDowell

Granta Books

₹1,801 (Kindle)

Published – February 13, 2026 11:52 am IST