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WORK TITLE: Fever Dream
WORK NOTES: trans by Megan McDowell
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE: 1978
WEBSITE:
CITY: Berlin
STATE:
COUNTRY: Germany
NATIONALITY: Argentine
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samanta_Schweblin * http://www.npr.org/2017/01/12/509350474/brief-but-creepy-fever-dream-has-a-poisonous-glow * http://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/the-sick-thrill-of-fever-dream * https://oneworld-publications.com/fever-dream-hb.html
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Born 1978, in Buenos Aires, Argentina.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Author.
AWARDS:Juan Rulfo Story Prize; Concurso Nacional Haroldo Conti Prize, 2001, for El núcleo del Disturbio; Fondo Nacional de las Artes Award, 2001; Casa de las Americas Prize, 2008, for La Furia de las pestes.
WRITINGS
Contributor to periodicals, including The Drawbridge.
Also contributor to books, including Cuentos Argentinos, Quand elles se glissent dans la peau d’un homme, La joven guardia, and Una terraza propia. Schweblin’s works have been translated into Danish, English, Dutch, French, Swedish, and Serbian.
SIDELIGHTS
Samanta Schweblin has earned noteworthy amounts of acclaim and exposure throughout her writing career. Her works are available to Danish-, English-, Dutch-, and French-speaking readers across the world, as well as in her mother language, Spanish, and various other languages. Her fiction works have also won multiple honors, including the Casa de las Americas award and the Fondo Nacional de las Artes prize. Readers may also find her work in several published anthologies.
Fever Dream is the first full-length novel to be published by Schweblin, as well as her first work to be translated into English. The book focuses on various events in the life of Amanda, whose journey is related while she is on the brink of death in the countryside of Argentina. The only person with her as she takes her last breaths is a little boy by the name of David. It is to David that she shares what has led to her current fate. Prior to her illness and impending death, Amanda took a trip to the countryside with Nina, her toddler daughter. As a mother, Amanda is watchful and ever fretful, and her parenting style grows ever stronger in the face of news concerning a deadly illness affecting both ranch animals and young children. As Amanda’s tale expands, evidence suggests she and David share a deep connection that intertwines with the illness spreading throughout the area. In BookPage, Cat Acree wrote: “Minimalist yet complex, monochromatic yet textured, Fever Dream is a delicate and marvelously constructed tale, like a bundle of our darkest worries artfully arranged into our own likeness.” Library Journal contributor Kate Gray recommended the book for “readers of Samuel Beckett, Jorge Luis Borges, Garcia Marquez, and other magical realism practitioners.” A reviewer in an issue of Publishers Weekly remarked: “Schweblin guides her reader through a nightmare scenario with amazing skill.” In Kirkus Reviews, a writer called the book “a taut, exquisite page-turner vibrating with existential distress and cumulative dread.” Manuel Roig-Franzia, a contributor to the Washington Post, commented: “Schweblin, though, is an artist of remarkable restraint, only dabbing on the atmospherics, while focusing her crystalline prose on the interior lives of the two mothers.” NPR reviewer Lily Meyer stated: “Schweblin writes with such restraint that I never questioned a sentence or a statement.” Meyer added: “This is the power of the short novel: Stripped down to its essentials, her story all but glows.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
BookPage, January, 2017, Cat Acree, review of Fever Dream, p. 20.
Kirkus Reviews, October 15, 2016, review of Fever Dream.
Library Journal, January 1, 2017, Kate Gray, review of Fever Dream, p. 94.
Publishers Weekly, October 24, 2016, review of Fever Dream, p. 52.
Washington Post, January 5, 2017, Manuel Roig-Franzia, “A haunting story by one of the best young Spanish-language writers,” review of Fever Dream.
ONLINE
Literary Hub, http://lithub.com/ (January 12, 2017), Bethanne Patrick, “Samanta Schweblin on Revealing Darkness Through Fiction: In conversation with Bethanne Patrick,” author interview.
Los Angeles Times Online, http://www.latimes.com/ (January 20, 2017), Ellie Robins, “Argentian star Samanta Schweblin’s destabilizing English debut, ‘Fever Dream.'”
NPR, http://www.npr.org/ (January 12, 2017), Lily Meyer, “Brief But Creepy, ‘Fever Dream’ Has A Poisonous Glow,” review of Fever Dream.*
Samanta Schweblin
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Samanta Schweblin
Born 1978
Buenos Aires
Occupation Writer
Education Film studies
Alma mater University of Buenos Aires
Genre short story
Samanta Schweblin was born in Buenos Aires in 1978. In 2001 she was granted her first award by the Fondo Nacional de las Artes (national Fund of the Arts). In that same year, her first book "El núcleo del Disturbio" (Planeta, 2002) garnered her the first prize of the Concurso Nacional Haroldo Conti. (National Contest Haroldo Conti). In 2008 she obtained the prize "Casa de las Americas" for her storybook "La Furia de las pestes", soon to be published. She was included in the anthologies "Quand elles se glissent dans la peau d'un homme" (Éditions Michalon, Francia. 2007), "Una terraza propia" (Norma, 2006), "La joven guardia" (Norma, 2005), "Cuentos Argentinos" (Siruela, España 2004), among others. Some of her stories have been translated into English, French, Serbian, Swedish, Dutch, and Danish, and published in magazines and other cultural forums. An English translation of her story "Killing a Dog" was published in the Summer 2009 issue of the London-based quarterly newspaper The Drawbridge.
Bibliography
2002, El núcleo del disturbio (ISBN 950-732-034-2)
2009, Pájaros en la boca (ISBN 978-84-264-1748-0)
To be translated by Megan McDowell (2024)
2014, Distancia de rescate (ISBN 978-987-3650-44-4)
Translated by Megan McDowell as Fever Dream (2017) (ISBN 9780399184598)
2015, Siete casas vacías (ISBN 978-84-8393-185-1)
Samanta Schweblin was chosen as one of the 22 best writers in Spanish under the age of 35 by Granta. She is the author of three story collections that have won numerous awards, including the prestigious Juan Rulfo Story Prize, and been translated into 20 languages. Fever Dream is her first novel and is longlisted for the Man Booker International Prize. Originally from Buenos Aires, she lives in Berlin.
Samanta Schweblin on Revealing Darkness Through Fiction
In conversation with Bethanne Patrick
January 12, 2017 By Bethanne Patrick
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Buenos Aires-born Samanta Schweblin now lives in Berlin—but she writes rocket-pitched prose in her native tongue. Chosen as one of the 22 Best Writers in Spanish Under 35 by Granta Magazine, Schweblin has received the prestigious Juan Rolfo Story Prize among others, and her work has been translated into 20 languages.
That number will probably increase with Fever Dream, her first novel to be released in English. Otherworldly and nightmarish from its first page, the brief story is a dialogue between a woman named Amanda and a boy named David that takes place in a hospital. What is wrong with Amanda? Does David suffer from the same malady, or not? Why is there so much talk of worms?
Recently in The New Yorker, Jia Tolentino wrote that Fever Dream has “a design so enigmatic and so disciplined that the book feels as if it belongs to a new literary genre altogether.” Once you’ve read it, you’ll understand: Its succinct length and broad symbols create a sort of prose-poem that fits many interpretations without sacrificing readability.
I spoke to Schweblin from her Berlin apartment; some questions and answers were provided via email. She insisted in both media that her English isn’t very good, but although once or twice she paused to think of a word, I found her otherwise quite fluent. However, if she’s happy writing in Spanish and having the talented Megan McDowell work with her, I’ll take it. After being electrified by Fever Dream, I can’t wait to see what Samanta Schweblin writes next.
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Bethanne Patrick: What’s it like in Berlin today?
Samanta Schweblin: Really wintery! It has been snowing for three days and everything is completely white. It’s really nice. I love Berlin on days like this.
BP: Why did you move to Berlin?
SS: I had a one-year scholarship from the city government, which was wonderful and very generous, really. When it ended it was hard to come back to real life! However, I came to Germany with my boyfriend, who is also Argentinean, and while I was busy writing he did what you do when you’re unemployed: He opened a bar. It’s in Kreuzberg.
BP: Does the atmosphere in Berlin make it easier to produce art?
SS: It’s really different from Buenos Aires, in a logistical way. I love Buenos Aires, but when I came here I realized I could work less but have more time to write. Here I can give workshops three times a week, and that’s enough to support my writing.
BP: Tell me a little about your road to becoming a writer. What are your days like, now, as a working writer, if not a full-time writer?
SS: I always felt attracted to books and stories. I started to go to some literary workshops when I was around 17 years old and I haven’t stopped writing since then. In Argentina, half of the writers have their own workshops and they give them in their own houses. As a participant it was amazing to learn in the living room of my favorite writers, having access to their libraries and discover writing life from so close. Now, living in Berlin, two days a week, I give my own workshops in my own living room, continuing the tradition. It was a surprise to me how many people write fiction in Spanish in Germany, and take it so seriously! The rest of the week I am a full-time writer.
BP: Does the novel matter anymore? If so, how and to whom?
SS: Well, it matters a lot to me. I think TV series, games, and general media have changed the way we tell stories. But books will remain. Technology has changed all the others arts: painting, theater, dancing, cinema, music. But literature is an absolutely intimate process between the writer’s voice and the reader’s mind, it is something so natural and strong that the only thing that technology could change is its support, its format, for example, if we read from a book or from an e-reader. But that doesn’t change the heart of literature.
BP: Who should Americans read that we don’t?
SS: So many names cross my mind that it’s almost impossible to answer that question. I learned to write reading North American literature, I love your literature, but I have this feeling that if a country only reads it own literature, it will run out of oxygen. I know this year two more Argentinian writers will be translated into English: Leila Guerrero—an exquisite chronicler—and Mariana Enriquez’s short stories, whose creepy and horrific plots could wake you up in the middle of the night. A lot of things are happening with contemporary women writers in Latin America. Maybe that would be a great place to start.
BP: What novel do you wish you had written?
SS: Some days I would say The Third Man, by Flann O’Brien, and some days The Invention of Morel, by Adolfo Bioy Casares.
BP: Who do YOU read right now? Do you read fiction while you’re writing it, or do you read poetry/nonfiction?
SS: Friends and writers are my most reliable reading guides. I am always taking note of recommendations from people who seem interesting to me. Sometimes they are not writers and their favorite books are not fiction but big ideas could come from that.
BP: Speaking of big ideas: Your book, as many have noted, is not like much else. Was that deliberate? Were you trying to go for something different?
SS: It is difficult to answer, but I will try. For me, creating tension is one of the most important things in reading and writing. I need that tension as a reader [ed. note: more on that below] but I also really need it when I’m writing, or I can’t keep working on a book. When I start a book, from the first idea I really need to feel that the thing I am doing is really new—because if not, there is no way for me to get my own attention! (Laughs)
When I was a child and didn’t know yet how to write, I used to tell stories to my mom. I was five or six years old, and every night I told her stories. I remember discovering the sensation that I could really touch someone else with storytelling, and even better—if I came up with something really dramatic, it meant I could turn the story and get some attention and I loooooooved that attention. There aren’t many moments in life when another person wants to hear you, when you can capture that person’s attention completely. It’s an amazing feeling, and when I’m writing, I’m trying to go for that moment.
BP: Let’s talk about the role of animals in Fever Dream: Horses. Insects. More.
SS: I want to show this kind of power they hold, also that David has information that the rest of us don’t, meaning the reader as well as Amanda. He knows a lot about death, and in a place where people are dying from agrichemicals, the animals are dying too. David has this power to help the ones who are dying. He has this relationship with all the things in the world between life and death—all the things that are in a kind of purgatory.
BP: I’m a parent, and I loved the idea of the “rescue distance,” the pull that Amanda says she feels whenever her daughter is away from her.
SS: I tried to give a subtle meaning, really subtle, about this idea that if there is an end of the world, it will begin with a mom. The tie with David is that when things become so bad that it’s all disasters in the world, when everything is so terrible, the small drama between two or three characters might be really important. It might be the beginning of something really deep, where a simple question helps you know where the evil starts—and if you know where the evil is, you can fight against it. When that happens, everything becomes dangerous. In some ways, that’s why the “rescue distance” gets broken: Everything in the world Amanda inhabits is dangerous.
BP: Why does this novel focus on mothers, and not fathers?
SS: I think that’s related to my own life. In my memory, men in my family were useful in some ways, like carrying heavy things—but when something went wrong that was related to the soul, to emotions, women took care of it. That’s not because the men didn’t care, but they didn’t understand and they couldn’t seem to do anything about it. At the end of Fever Dream when all the women are gone the only ones who remain are two fathers who want to care—but they can’t really communicate.
BP: Why does David keep telling Amanda “this doesn’t matter” and to keep moving on? What is that all about?
SS: When I was writing the book many times I had the sensation that when David asks Amanda to move on, that he was actually talking to me, saying go for this another way. What an interesting kind of metaphor for what is worth saying and what is not worth saying!
David’s voice took time. I wrote about 12 different beginnings of five or six pages each, trying to find the voice of the narrator. At the end of that process, I heard David’s voice talking with Amanda. At first I thought their dialogue would be part of the novel. Then I realized that the dialogue was the novel. It was the story itself that told me how to do it.
BP: Disease and environmental devastation are global problems. Could your story be set anywhere? Or only in Latin America?
SS: This story could be set anywhere. In fact, the first time I heard about pesticides and their terrible consequences was through a documentary about this subject in France. But, mainly because of corruption, Latin America has the worst agrochemical regulations and agreements. And Argentina, in particular, is one of the biggest importers of soya—one of the products more related with pesticides. We spread this soya all over the world; it is the base of a lot of our food. Soya is in everything: cookies, frozen fish, cereal bars, soups, bread, all kinds of flour, even ice cream!
BP: How is the current American political situation viewed in Germany/Europe/the rest of the world?
SS: I think we are all really worried. Here in Germany, my circle of friends is not happy with Donald Trump as the new President of the United States—although the European right sympathize with him. And as a Latin American, I can assure you that the populist right could be really dangerous.
BP: Does a book like yours speak to modern politics more than a nonfiction book does? Why or why not?
SS: It does speak to modern politics, yes, but in another way. Literature can’t be informative, didactic, or indoctrinating, but it can leave a real mark on your fears, open new windows in your mind, make yourself question something you had never thought about before. And sometimes that is as important as factual information, even more reliable.
Argentian star Samanta Schweblin's destabilizing English debut, 'Fever Dream'
Samanta Schweblin
Samanta Schweblin, author of the novel 'Fever Dream'. CREDIT: ALEJANDRA LOPEZ (ALEJANDRA LOPEZ /)
Ellie Robins
Over the last two decades, Argentina’s rural communities have reported skyrocketing rates of birth abnormalities, miscarriages and cancer. In the same period, genetically modified soy has blanketed the region, helped along by copious pesticides. GM soy arrived in Argentina in 1996 and accounted for 23% of the country’s exports in 2014. Even as rural families suffer, planes fly over the pampas, spraying chemicals on the vibrant green monoculture that ripples all the way to the horizon.
This is the landscape in which Samanta Schweblin’s unsettling debut novel unfolds, to a soundtrack of rustling soy fields. “Fever Dream” is a narrative nesting doll best illustrated by one early scene: Carla, a country woman in a gold bikini, sits in a car parked in a driveway, telling a terrifying story about the day she turned her back and her son, David, drank from a poisoned creek. She’s talking to Amanda, a well-to-do woman from Buenos Aires vacationing in the countryside with her daughter.
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Carla’s story is nestled in the story of Amanda’s vacation, and wrapped around that is another story still: “Fever Dream” and all its events are framed as a conversation between Amanda and Carla’s son David — characters who meet in the flesh only once. They’re speaking in the local emergency clinic, but they’re also in some dark no-man’s-land, a liminal dimension: “There’s only darkness, and you’re talking into my ear. I don’t even know if this is really happening,” Amanda says. David is pushing Amanda to pinpoint the moment something terrible happened, which she will know from a feeling of worms in her body:
“It’s dark and I can’t see,” she says. “The sheets are rough, they bunch up under my body. I can’t move, but I’m talking.”
“It’s the worms,” David replies, his voice always italicized. “You have to be patient and wait. And while we wait, we have to find the exact moment when the worms come into being.”
Where are they really? What has happened, and what do the worms signify? Why is David pushing Amanda to tell him this story? These are “Fever Dream’s” questions.
Though this is a debut novel, Buenos Aires-born Schweblin is already a luminary of Argentine fiction, with three award-winning short-story collections under her belt, not to mention anointment in 2010 as one of Granta’s best Spanish-language writers. In fact, “luminary of Argentine fiction” might be too restrictive: today, Schweblin lives in Berlin, and her work has been translated into 20 languages. With this first book-length translation into English, she has the backing of an illustrious publisher and a gifted translator, Megan McDowell, who’s worked with several rising stars of Latin American fiction. “Fever Dream” should position Schweblin comfortably alongside young American writers such as Amelia Gray and Jesse Ball.
Like these American counterparts, Schweblin writes in a spare and highly impressionistic style that embraces instability: of space, identity, and the reader’s trust. But though it taps into an international mood, “Fever Dream” is also a deeply Argentine work, about parental love, rapacious industrial agriculture and the trauma of history. In fact, the novel represents a perfect marriage of form and subject, in which its narrative instability — which is so of the literary moment — viscerally recreates the insecurities of life in the Argentine countryside today.
Schweblin, like Gray and Ball, has found ways to electrify and destabilize the physical world. In particular, she shatters the notion that there might be such a thing as a safe space. The title of the Spanish edition translates to “Rescue Distance,” a recurring phrase describing the distance from which Amanda can safely rescue her daughter. “I spend half the day calculating it,” she says, because “sooner or later something terrible will happen” — a clenched conviction other parents might well recognize.
But there’s no such thing as “rescue distance” when the earth and the water are saturated with toxic chemicals. Schweblin sets up the quaint notion in order to knock it down: Nowhere is safe, and there will be no rescuing. This is a defining characteristic of postmodern horror stories, but it’s also precisely the experience of living in a landscape that’s been poisoned.
Identity, too, is destabilized in a profoundly Argentine way. David’s voice ghoulishly frames the novel, but David also appears as an embodied and deeply uncanny character. The poisoning and its only cure have split the boy from his soul. And this in a country where 35 years ago, parents were being kidnapped, tortured, and disappeared, their babies stolen and brought up by the families of the military dictatorship. Just like this novel, Argentina is haunted by ghost children with split identities.
“Fever Dream,” then, is a novel about childless parents and parentless children, about split identities and living on land you can’t trust — which is to say, it's a novel about Argentina’s struggles. More than that, it’s the scariest of all things: a ghost story that is, in essence, true.
Robins is a writer and translator who lives in Los Angeles.
“Fever Dream”
Samanta Schweblin, translated by Megan McDowell
Riverhead: 192 pp., $25
Fever Dream
Cat Acree
(Jan. 2017): p20.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 BookPage
http://bookpage.com/
FEVER DREAM
By Samanta
Schweblin
Translated by Megan
McDowell
Riverhead
$25, 192 pages
ISBN 9780399184598
Audio, eBook available
SUSPENSE
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
Argentinian author Samanta Schweblin's English-language debut, Fever Dream, snares readers. It's a page-turner of mounting dread, unfolding entirely through a conversation between a bedridden young woman and the boy who whispers in her ear.
Amanda lies dying in a hospital clinic in rural Argentina. Sitting next to her is David, a boy who asks her--urges her--to remember the events of whatever trauma rendered her terminally ill. At his behest, Amanda recalls meeting David's mother, a nervous and elegant woman named Carla. Carla tells Amanda a strange story about a very young David, who drinks the same toxic water that kills Carla's husband's prized stallion. To spare her son's life, Carla calls upon a local woman with medicinal and magical abilities. By splitting David's soul with another child's, she saves the boy.
But this is only the beginning. Why is Amanda in the hospital? And what has happened to Amanda's own daughter, Nina? Time and again, Amanda references the "rescue distance," the variable space between her and Nina, the distance between a mother and any worst-case scenario that may imperil her child. "I spend half the day calculating it," Amanda says. As she recalls more and more details, Amanda begins to tell the story her own way, trying to make sense of what matters in these events and what does not--and decide which threats are inevitable or imagined.
With the urgency, attention to detail and threat of an abrupt ending that define short stories, the novel builds unease seamlessly through exceptionally well-paced dialogue. The sparseness of Schweblin's prose, translated by Megan McDowell, anchors this strange conversation and keeps it from becoming disorienting.
Minimalist yet complex, monochromatic yet textured, Fever Dream is a delicate and marvelously constructed tale, like a bundle of our darkest worries artfully arranged into our own likeness.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Acree, Cat. "Fever Dream." BookPage, Jan. 2017, p. 20. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA475225436&it=r&asid=5fcc24672875c7af2eebe62c3d1fdfa7. Accessed 1 July 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A475225436
Schweblin, Samanta. Fever Dream
Kate Gray
142.1 (Jan. 1, 2017): p94.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 Library Journals, LLC. A wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
http://www.libraryjournal.com/
* Schweblin, Samanta. Fever Dream. Riverhead. Jan. 2017.192p. tr. From Spanish by Megan McDowell. ISBN 9780399184598. $25; ebk. ISBN 9780399184611. F
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, Garcia Marquez, and other magical realism practitioners will devour this brilliant, unsettling novel. [See Prepub Alert, 7/11/16.]--Kate Gray, Boston P.L., MA
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Gray, Kate. "Schweblin, Samanta. Fever Dream." Library Journal, 1 Jan. 2017, p. 94. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA476562336&it=r&asid=28d9fc615a29814162ae261d7dc94ee0. Accessed 1 July 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A476562336
Fever Dream
263.43 (Oct. 24, 2016): p52.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Fever Dream
Samanta Schweblin, trans. from the Spanish by Megan McDowell. Riverhead, $25 (192p) ISBN 978-0-399-18459-8
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.)
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Fever Dream." Publishers Weekly, 24 Oct. 2016, p. 52. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA468771782&it=r&asid=0909d92fda4350c8f09b8fab37b8409f. Accessed 1 July 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A468771782
Samanta Schweblin, Megan McDowell: FEVER DREAM
(Oct. 15, 2016):
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Samanta Schweblin, Megan McDowell FEVER DREAM Riverhead (Adult Fiction) 25.00 ISBN: 978-0-399-18459-8
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.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Samanta Schweblin, Megan McDowell: FEVER DREAM." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Oct. 2016. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA466551595&it=r&asid=6386651a345d9cfd59ac62a1feae1251. Accessed 1 July 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A466551595
A haunting story by one of the best young Spanish-language writers
Manuel Roig-Franzia
(Jan. 5, 2017):
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 The Washington Post
Byline: Manuel Roig-Franzia
Early on in "Fever Dream," Samanta Schweblin's mesmerizing debut novel, a young mother tells a friend about a calculation she is forever making and remaking. She calls it the "rescue distance."
"That's what I've named the variable distance separating me from my daughter," Amanda explains, as she watches her child tottering perilously toward a swimming pool.
But Amanda's obsession with the rescue distance doesn't ease her fears. It amplifies them. The more she measures, the shorter the distance becomes. She likens it to a rope, pulling ever tighter, tugging at her maternal preoccupations, tormenting her. "The rope is so taut now I feel it in my stomach," Amanda says while struggling to explain her primal anxiety.
Amanda is a woozy chronicler of her demons, for she tells her story while lying on her deathbed, felled by some toxic, man-made menace. Her recollections are prompted, with growing urgency, by a friend's child, David, who sits at her bedside and pushes her into an agonizing self-exploration, all the while reminding her that she soon will be gone.
David -- Schweblin hints -- might be a hallucination, a product of the fevered state that gives the novel, nimbly translated by Megan McDowell, its title. But his existence or nonexistence doesn't really matter because the emotions he elicits are so chillingly real and familiar.
Schweblin, who was born in Argentina and lives in Germany, was hailed by Granta several years ago as one of the best young Spanish-language writers, and she has been lavishly praised by the likes of the Peruvian master Mario Vargas Llosa and the celebrated Colombian novelist Juan Gabriel VA squez. "Fever Dream," a slim novel that was originally published in Spanish in 2014 as "Distancia de Rescate," represents a new phase in the career of Schweblin, 38, who had previously dazzled her literary admirers with collections of her deftly constructed short stories.
Like her characters, Schweblin has been taken by the notion of distance. In a BBC interview, she recalled how she befuddled her teachers by refusing to speak for a time at age 12 because she was frustrated by the distance between her thoughts and her ability to make others understand them.
In the hands of a less talented writer, "Fever Dream" might have veered into the realm of the predictably macabre. Amanda and her daughter are incapacitated by a mysterious substance leaching into the ground and the water at the countryside vacation spot where she and her family have sought respite from the grime of the city. Before long, horses and ducks and dogs are staggering around in wobbly death throes. Misshapen children appear in the gloom of remembrance. A house Amanda visits has a back yard-turned-burial ground, studded with piles of dirt.
David's mother, Carla, remembers seeing him with his back turned, "small and strange with his arms hanging down by the sides of his body and his little fists clenched, as if he'd been startled by something threatening."
Schweblin, though, is an artist of remarkable restraint, only dabbing on the atmospherics, while focusing her crystalline prose on the interior lives of the two mothers, Amanda and Carla, as well as the vagaries of memory.
David wants to control the conversation, to shape the contours of Amanda's story. He is insistent. "The important thing already happened," he chides at one point. "What follows are only consequences."
But Amanda, like most of us, desires a measure of control over her own narrative. "It scares me when you don't say anything for so long. Every time you could say something but don't, I wonder if maybe I'm just talking to myself," she says. "I want to know what's happening now," she demands, pushing forward through the muck of her past against David's attempts to channel her thoughts.
Schweblin renders psychological trauma with such alacrity that the conceit of a poisoned environment feels almost beside the point. The requisite scene of workers unloading sinister barrels of chemicals is rendered quickly. It's a mere steppingstone in a meatier drama, and one that we've seen produced in even more frightening and convincing fashion in nonfiction works, such as Jonathan Harr's brilliant "A Civil Action" about an infamous water contamination case in Woburn, Mass.
Schweblin's characters drink mate and eat dulce de leche doughnuts, but she doesn't dwell on hallmarks of a geographical place. The space that she evokes most vividly lies between our rational minds and our preoccupations.
When Amanda arrives at the vacation home, she can't sleep. "Before all else," she says, "I have to know what is around the house. Whether there are dogs, and if they're friendly, whether there are ditches, and how deep they are."
Comfort is derived from controllable, manageable locales. David's mother lives in a nearby home swaddled by wheat fields, a perimeter she appreciates "because it makes our yard smaller, more intimate."
The protective urge consumes Amanda, and Schweblin pulls the rope closer and closer until the rescue distance is almost gone.
After reading "Fever Dream," I wanted Schweblin to let the rope out more. Not because "Fever Dream" isn't an almost perfect short novel -- because it most certainly is. But because I wanted to see what Schweblin could do when she went deeper into the place where she so skillfully had taken me.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Roig-Franzia, Manuel. "A haunting story by one of the best young Spanish-language writers." Washingtonpost.com, 5 Jan. 2017. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA476665607&it=r&asid=ba03222d54a6ce1fe723dd11f10100af. Accessed 1 July 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A476665607
Brief But Creepy, 'Fever Dream' Has A Poisonous Glow
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January 12, 20177:00 AM ET
Lily Meyer
Fever Dream
Fever Dream
by Samanta Schweblin
Hardcover, 192 pages
purchase
Latin American literature has an excellent tradition of short and creepy novels. The leader of the pack is Juan Rulfo's classic Pedro Páramo, set in a town where everybody is dead, but Rulfo is in good company. Chilean masters José Donoso and Roberto Bolaño wrote breathtaking novellas; so have present-day Mexican stars Valeria Luiselli and Carmen Boullosa. And so has the Argentine short story writer Samanta Schweblin, whose first novel, Fever Dream, is an exceptional example of the short-and-creepy form.
The novel starts as a warped child's game. A woman named Amanda is dying in a clinic in rural Argentina, in a town where she's gone on vacation; as she dies, a child named David interrogates her about the events leading up to her sickness. He wants to find "the exact moment when the worms come into being." What worms? "Worms in the body."
Amanda, in response, tells David a story that she heard from his mother: David got sick after drinking river water; she took him to a local healer rather than wait "for some rural doctor who wouldn't even make it to the clinic in time;" and in order to save him, the healer removed half his soul from his body, replacing it with half a stranger's.
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This turns out to be true, but David dismisses it. "Those are stories my mother tells. Neither you nor I have time for this. We're looking for worms." He sounds like he's on a treasure hunt, or playing the sort of prolonged imaginary game little kids invent, the ones where no adult can comprehend the rules. This is important, he says, or this is unimportant, and Amanda, sick as she is, plays along.
This is the power of the short novel: Stripped down to its essentials, [Schweblin's] story all but glows. Which makes sense, after all. It's toxic.
Lily Meyer
But then we reach the important moment, and the atmosphere of invention falls away. Amanda describes going with her daughter Nina to visit David's mother at the town's largest farm, where she works as a bookkeeper; while they wait for her, they sit outside and watch a crew of men unloading plastic drums from a truck. One of the drums is left alone in the grass, Amanda says, and David tells her, "This is the important thing." The story moves on: Mother and daughter stand up and find their clothes damp. It's dew, Amanda says, but she can feel danger. She wants her daughter close. She tastes something bitter under her tongue. By the end of the day, both she and Nina are poisoned.
This is where Schweblin comes closest to Pedro Páramo. Rulfo's novel is half surreal tale of the afterlife and half political critique: Comala, where it's set, is a town of the dead because Pedro Páramo, its sole landowner, starved his tenants to death in a prolonged act of cruelty and rage. Fever Dream is an eco-critic's version of the same plot. Amanda and Nina, we understand, have been poisoned by toxic agricultural chemicals. So has David, who drank from the town's river. So have the rest of the children in the town. Amanda sees a parade of them, "strange children ... Deformed children. They don't have eyelashes, or eyebrows. Their skin is very pink, and scaly too." David tells her, "Around here there aren't many children who have been born right."
Like Pedro Páramo, Fever Dream is an attack on big landowners. The town's farm prospers as the farm workers' children soak up poisonous waste. Its owner destroys his town with carelessness rather than intentional cruelty, but the result is the same. This a town of the dying. It would be a town of the dead but for the local healer, in whom Schweblin asks us to believe entirely, because that's what you have to do in a horror story. And this book, don't get me wrong, is horror. After the healer replaces half of David's soul, his parents are so frightened of him that they lock him in his room every night. He devotes himself to killing poisoned animals and burying them in the yard. He is the archetypal possessed child, guiding Amanda from her life into his.
But of course our real guide is Samanta Schweblin, translated perfectly by Megan McDowell, who for my money is the best Spanish-to-English translator around. Schweblin writes with such restraint that I never questioned a sentence or a statement. This is the power of the short novel: Stripped down to its essentials, her story all but glows. Which makes sense, after all. It's toxic.
Lily Meyer works at Politics & Prose Bookstore in Washington, D.C.