10/24/2016
In her pulsating debut, Schweblin tells the story of Amanda, a young mother dying in a hospital, who talks to a neighborhood boy, David, as he sits by her bedside. David has Amanda recount the events leading up to her sudden illness—in search of, as he says, “the worms” that caused her ailment—and the result is a swirling narrative packed with dream logic and bizarre coincidences, where souls shift from sick bodies to healthy hosts and poisonous toxins seep under the skin upon contact with the grass. As Amanda and her daughter, Nina, try to settle in at their vacation home away from the city, they become entangled with Carla, David’s mother, who appears at random intervals and spins wild tales of her son. After a frightening encounter with David, Amanda throws Carla and the boy out of her home, yet before long, the trio of women are reunited, and from her future hospital bed, a semilucid Amanda tries to remember how this meeting resulted in her death spiral. Powered by an unreliable narrator—is Amanda imagining David by her side?—Schweblin guides her reader through a nightmare scenario with amazing skill. (Jan.)
"A taut, exquisite page-turner vibrating with existential distress and cumulative dread.... While the book resides in the realm of the uncanny, its concerns are all too real. Once the top blows off Schweblin’s chest of horrors, into which we’d been peeking through a masterfully manipulated crack, what remains is an unsettling and significant dissection of maternal love and fear, of the devastation we’ve left to the future, and of our inability to escape or control the unseen and unimagined threats all around us. In a literary thriller of the highest order, Schweblin teases out the underlying anxieties of being vulnerable and loving vulnerable creatures and of being an inhabitant of a planet with an increasingly uncertain future." —Kirkus, STARRED review
“[A] pulsating debut…Schweblin guides her reader through a nightmare scenario with amazing skill.” —Publishers Weekly
“The unique style, the quick paced rhythm and the amazingly wise and compact storytelling create a special novel that will stay in your mind long after you put this book down.”
—Etgar Keret, author of The Seven Good Years
“Samanta Schweblin is a magician, and reading her work is an intense, almost physical experience. This mind-bending book sheds new light—or, rather, new darkness—on the intense power of love in a poisoned world. You must read it. Prepare to be mesmerized, riveted, terrified, and changed.”
—Helen Phillips, author of The Beautiful Bureaucrat
“Fever Dream is a small masterpiece, a beautiful and chillingly contemporary book. Every word throbs a kind of wisdom that can only come from a meticulous and fully engaged observation of reality.”
—Alejandro Zambra, author of Multiple Choice and My Documents
“Samanta Schweblin will injure you, however safe you may feel.”
—Jesse Ball, author of A Cure for Suicide and How to Set a Fire and Why
“Samanta Schweblin is one of the most promising voices in modern literature.” —Mario Vargas Llosa
“She has a unique, inventive voice, and her stories have this ability to veer off into strange and unexpected territories with sublime grace. I admire and envy this gift.” —Daniel Alarcón, author of At Night We Walk in Circles
“In spare, lucid prose, Schweblin demonstrates again and again that she knows the weight of what is left unsaid in the comings and goings of everyday life. Then, in the turn of a phrase, she forces the reader to shift perspective; she has a gift for sketching comfortable worlds and then disrupting them with images of dark, startling power.” —Electric Literature
★ 01/01/2017
For those who believe that, as Franz Kafka famously said, "a book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us," Schweblin's surreal debut novel will be a breath of fresh air. The Buenos Aires-born, Berlin-based Schweblin was named one of Granta's best writers in Spanish under the age of 35 and has already published three short story collections. This novel is told in conversational fragments between two unseen narrators. One is asking questions, trying to get the other to determine the exact moment she was contaminated. The events they recollect concern Amanda and her daughter, Nina, on holiday in the country, where Amanda first learns from her friend Carla of a mysterious poison that affected Carla's son, David, and the family's horses. The hallucinatory flow of the dialog moves the story along quickly, and readers may have to turn back to find a missing puzzle piece. Those who are willing to stay with this book will find the experience like no other and well worth the effort. VERDICT Readers of Samuel Beckett, Jorge Luis Borges, García Márquez, and other magical realism practitioners will devour this brilliant, unsettling novel. [See Prepub Alert, 7/11/16.]—Kate Gray, Boston P.L., MA
★ 2016-10-05
A taut, exquisite page-turner vibrating with existential distress and cumulative dread.Schweblin’s English-language debut, translated by the eminently capable McDowell, plays out as a tense, sustained dialogue in an emergency clinic somewhere in the Argentinian countryside between a dying woman named Amanda and her dispassionate interlocutor, David, who, we quickly ascertain, is a child but seems to be neither her child nor any clear relation to her. At David’s ever more insistent prompting, Amanda recounts a series of events from the apparently recent past, but as he pushes her to recall whatever trauma has landed her in her terminal state, a struggle for narrative control ensues. Though Amanda gradually gains the power to tell her story in her own way—despite David’s frequent protestations that she's dwelling on irrelevant details that won’t help her understand her circumstances—the impotence and inchoate dangers that underscore the conversation in the clinic ricochet throughout the larger story being told, of what brought her there and why David is with her. Even with the small freedom to tell the deathbed tale she wants to tell, she moves inexorably in the retelling toward the moment when death became inevitable, just as time, in the clinic, creeps closer to the realization of that death. While the book resides in the realm of the uncanny, its concerns are all too real. Once the top blows off Schweblin’s chest of horrors, into which we’d been peeking through a masterfully manipulated crack, what remains is an unsettling and significant dissection of maternal love and fear, of the devastation we’ve left to the future, and of our inability to escape or control the unseen and unimagined threats all around us. In a literary thriller of the highest order, Schweblin teases out the underlying anxieties of being vulnerable and loving vulnerable creatures and of being an inhabitant of a planet with an increasingly uncertain future.
