fever dream samanta schweblin sparknotes

Samanta Schweblin: Well, it’s always strange, to be honest. And noooow, sixteen years later, you’re thinking about these texts all over again, and I wonder what that experience has been like for you. Mouthful of Birds contains a few stories that were first published in 2002, in El núcleo del disturbio, and then appeared seven years later in Pájaros en la boca. I thought we might start off by talking about the kinds of displacement that happen in translation-in space, but also in time. Mouthful of Birds is a narrative world in which the social contract is always negotiable (“Irman,” “Heads Against Concrete,” and “The Heavy Suitcase of Benavides”) and great rifts open up in the earth (“The Digger” and “Underground”) to explore this world means losing your bearings. Home is not a site of solace, but a menacing space with a murky logic all its own: in the title story, the estranged parents of a teenage girl struggle to cope with her unsettling new diet, while in “Toward Happy Civilization” the kind offer of a night’s lodging turns sinister as a traveler’s departure is indefinitely postponed.

Mouthful of Birds, Schweblin’s second collaboration with translator Megan McDowell, is a dark constellation of stories that hum with solitude, violence, and disorientation (of characters and reader, alike) their combination of “dread, doubles, and confident loose ends” recently earned the author a comparison to David Lynch. Her novel Fever Dream-a chilling look at the damage done to us by the damage we’ve done to the natural world, and our inability to protect the ones we love from it-was a finalist for the Man Booker International Prize in 2017 it won both the Shirley Jackson Award for Best Novella and the Tournament of Books that year. Her work has received numerous awards, including the prestigious Juan Rulfo Prize, recognition from Argentina’s National Fund for the Arts, and the Casa de las Américas Prize. Surreal and haunting, spare yet complex, Samanta Schweblin’s fiction is like little else being written right now.

Fever dream samanta schweblin sparknotes