Fever Dream

October 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.

Starred review from October 15, 2016
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.

COPYRIGHT(2016) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

October 15, 2016
Schweblin's first novel tells a frenetic, unnerving tale. A young mother, Amanda, is afflicted by a sudden illness and accepts that death is imminent. As she waits in her hospital bed, she hears the hovering voice of a young boy, David, who guides her as she recounts the events leading to her current dire situation. After arriving at a rural vacation home with her daughter, Nina, Amanda strikes up a friendship with their alluring neighbor, Carla, a local who is revealed to be David's mother. Carla shares with Amanda an unusual story about her son and her efforts to save him after he was poisoned. Amanda, at first dubious, becomes increasingly troubled by both mother and son and makes plans to cut their vacation short and return home. But things go awry when Amanda decides to bid Carla farewell. Schweblin's sparse narrative, both familiar and mysterious, quickly grows in intensity as the hazy whispers of self-doubt and death itself descend. A thought-provoking story that provides ample opportunity for readers to grapple with its unanswered questions.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2016, American Library Association.)

August 1, 2016

Buenos Aires-born and Berlin-based, Schweblin has won multiple awards for her story collections and been published in anthologies and magazines worldwide. Her debut novel--also her first work to be translated into English--relates the story of a community doubly poisoned by toxic waste and invidious relationships.

Copyright 2016 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from January 1, 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, 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

Copyright 2017 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

January 1, 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, 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

Copyright 2017 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.