Little Eyes

March 23, 2020
Schweblin (Fever Dream) unfurls an eerie, uncanny story of Furby-like robots that roll around and make animal sounds, connecting people throughout the world in unsettling ways. The dolls, called kentuki, are equipped with cameras and separate controllers, and their ownership is split between “keepers” and “dwellers.” The keeper purchases a doll, while the dweller buys its controller and watches through the kentuki’s camera via the internet. Schweblin catapults through a dizzying array of vignettes. Marvin, a boy in Antigua, secretly buys a kentuki “dweller” controller using his mother’s savings. In South Bend, Ind., Robin and two of her friends conduct cam shows with their kentuki before the dweller begins spelling out increasingly alarming and sexual demands on the girls’ Ouija board. Emilia, a lonely woman in Lima, quickly takes on the dweller role with Eva, a woman in Germany, who buys dog toys and other pet distractions for Emilia to play with via the kentuki. Daring, bold, and devious, the idea fascinates despite the underdeveloped narrative, and the disparate vignettes fail to build toward a satisfying conclusion. Schweblin’s take on the erosion of privacy and new forms of digital connection yields an ingenious concept, but the sum is less than its parts.

Narrator Cassandra Campbell portrays a cast of characters from around the world in a work of speculative fiction that addresses the ubiquity of technology. Virtual pets, called "kentukis," allow a stranger from somewhere else in the world to control everything the pet sees, while the owner can choose how much or how little to share. Campbell's narration is immersive. The listener feels transported from Spain to Sweden and to Brazil as she seamlessly slips between the third-person narrative and the dialogue, using accents and inflection to reflect locale and, more importantly, the age of the characters. This story encourages listeners to grapple with how they themselves use technology. A.R.F. � AudioFile 2020, Portland, Maine