Samanta Schweblin: Mimo dosah

“And now I have something extra in my body, something new is turning on or off, something sharp and bright.”

Dusty roads, a broken fence, empty horse paddocks, scorching heat, and lush green horizons planted with soybeans. “We're in the countryside here, Amanda. Every now and then someone drops out, and even if they make it, they're still weird afterward.” An Argentine province a few hundred kilometers from the capital is the setting for the first meeting between Amanda, who is fleeing the city with her daughter to the tranquility of the suburbs, and Carla, a quirky and beautiful woman, mother of the strange and mysterious David. A boy who plays strange games in the garden, who constantly repeats his “It's not important,” and who now stands too close to Amanda, lying on the verge of exhaustion, trying to help her. Or is he?

In her 2014 novella Fever Dream, Samanta Schweblin uses uncompromising storytelling to delve into the exhausting and often destructive relationship between mother and child. The constant transformation of fear into joy and vice versa, the anxious measuring of the safe distance that must be quickly overcome if something goes wrong, or the simple burden of not understanding one's own child are themes that the author serves up against the backdrop of a barren and remote landscape. A landscape so exhausted that the bonds between people and the bonds with nature cease to function. The safety distance, as the original title of the text suggests, is also a metaphor for the thread that barely holds the world as people know it together.