Fever Dream by Samanta Schweblin
In a remote hospital clinic, a young woman named Amanda is in terminal condition. David, a young boy, is seated next to her. He does not have a mother. Not her child, he. Together, they weave a spooky tale of poisons, broken spirits, and the strength and desperation of family.
In addition to being a love story and a cautionary tale, Fever Dream is a nightmare come to life. In this gripping, frightening, taut novel, one of the most innovative new voices to emerge from the Spanish language and translated for the first time into English, Samanta Schweblin creates an aura of peculiar psychological dread and unearthly reality.
Fever Dream by Samanta Schweblin
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brilliant and succinct A woman and child travel from any large city (but most likely from Buenos Aires) to a holiday rental by a river. The husband will spend the weekend with them. The neighbour brings them a pail of water and warns them not to drink the tap water because it smells. But when they came thirsty, they already had, just a little.
The speech is confusing and illogical as Amanda, the book’s main character, lies in a semi-conscious state. Although the novel DOES continue in this abstract manner, as the plot develops and Amanda starts to remember what happened to her, the style starts to make more and more sense.
The narrative they share centres on a bizarre illness that has befallen David, with events swiftly spiralling to include Carla, David’s mother, and Nina, Amanda’s daughter. An in-depth examination of maternal love is provided in “Fever Dream”; the two moms have quite different interactions with their kids, which allows the author to present both a sympathetic mother and one whose response to her child is more difficult but perhaps not entirely alien. As a parent, I was immediately drawn to Schweblin’s usage of the term “rescue distance” to define how far a mother can physically be from a young kid. Additionally, Schweblin’s description of familial love is believable and gives the story an emotional depth that makes it even more compelling.
Beyond the parent-child connections, “Fever Dream” cleverly incorporates pollution and genetically modified (GM) crops into the narrative to highlight society’s obligation to future generations.
The main mysteries of the novel force the reader to imagine their own awful solutions to the questions the characters ask one another about what has happened to them, which creates a pervasive feeling of dread throughout. Although I don’t read a lot of translated fiction, Megan McDowell appears to have done a superb job of translating this from its original Spanish into English. The story is more convincing thanks to the conversational prose’s realistic and captivating style than it may be with a less skilful delivery. It never exhibits the annoying clunkiness.
