Virtual pets -- Fiction. |
Long-distance relationships -- Fiction. |
Dystopias. |
Cyber pets |
Cyberpets |
Pets, Virtual |
Tamagotchis (Trademark) |
LDRs (Long-distance relationships) |
Available:
Library | Shelf Number | Shelf Location | Status |
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Searching... Plainville Public Library | F SCHWEBLIN, S. | FICTION | Searching... Unknown |
Searching... Fairhaven-Millicent | FIC SCHWEBLIN SAMANTA LITTLE | FICTION | Searching... Unknown |
Searching... Foxboro - Boyden Library | FIC SCHWEBLIN | FICTION | Searching... Unknown |
Searching... Taunton Public Library | SCHWEBLIN, SAMANTA | 1ST FLOOR STACKS | Searching... Unknown |
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Summary
Summary
LONGLISTED FOR THE 2020 MAN BOOKER INTERNATIONAL PRIZE
A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK OF THE YEAR
"Her most unsettling work yet -- and her most realistic." -- New York Times
Named a Best Book of the Year by The New York Times , O, The Oprah Magazine , NPR, Vulture , Bustle, Refinery29, and Thrillist
A visionary novel about our interconnected present, about the collision of horror and humanity, from a master of the spine-tingling tale.
They've infiltrated homes in Hong Kong, shops in Vancouver, the streets of in Sierra Leone, town squares in Oaxaca, schools in Tel Aviv, bedrooms in Indiana. They're everywhere. They're here. They're us. They're not pets, or ghosts, or robots. They're real people, but how can a person living in Berlin walk freely through the living room of someone in Sydney? How can someone in Bangkok have breakfast with your children in Buenos Aires, without your knowing? Especially when these people are completely anonymous, unknown, unfindable.
The characters in Samanta Schweblin's brilliant new novel, Little Eyes , reveal the beauty of connection between far-flung souls--but yet they also expose the ugly side of our increasingly linked world. Trusting strangers can lead to unexpected love, playful encounters, and marvelous adventure, but what happens when it can also pave the way for unimaginable terror? This is a story that is already happening; it's familiar and unsettling because it's our present and we're living it, we just don't know it yet. In this prophecy of a story, Schweblin creates a dark and complex world that's somehow so sensible, so recognizable, that once it's entered, no one can ever leave.
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
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. (May)
Booklist Review
The internationally acclaimed author of Fever Dream (2017) posits the launch of a new fad in this daring and original speculative novel. People around the world have become fixated on "kentucki:" small, motorized stuffed animals that are powered by anonymous strangers. Neither the keeper (the owner of and caretaker for the kentucki) nor the dweller (the person who controls the kentucki from another location) knows the other's identity; they're anonymous strangers from different lands. They're not intended to communicate; there's no microphone in the kentuckis. And yet this doesn't stop the keepers and dwellers from becoming invested in each other's lives, or finding a way to reach out to each other. A trio of teenage girls are blackmailed by the person powering the kentucki belonging to one of them. The bored girlfriend of a feckless artist takes out her rage on her kentucki. An older woman in Lima worries about the brutish new boyfriend of the owner of her kentucki. Schweblin deftly explores both the loneliness and casual cruelty that can inform our attempts to connect in this modern world.
Guardian Review
Every technological innovation both changes its human users and uncovers something new about our nature. In this ingenious novel, Argentinian author Samanta Schweblin conducts an unnerving thought experiment: if an individual could be virtually inserted into the life of a random stranger, anywhere in the world, what effects would that have on them both? And what hidden truths would be revealed? Little Eyes follows her gripping 2017 novella Fever Dream, a destabilising parable about GM farming and maternal anxiety, and a story collection of domestic surrealism, Mouthful of Birds; all three books have been long- or shortlisted for the International Booker. In her new novel the gadget that's sweeping the globe is called a kentuki. It's not much more, says one character, than "a cell phone with legs", but the camera and speaker are housed within the felt-covered, remotely propelled body of a toy animal - rabbit or panda, dragon or crow, the buyer or "keeper" decides. What the keeper can't choose is who the "dweller" connecting with the robot and watching online is, while dwellers have no control over where, and with whom, they "wake up". As with a human life, the stakes are high; there is one connection per kentuki, one mind per body. When the keeper destroys their pet or forgets to charge its batteries, or the dweller disconnects, it's game over, no replays. If death is what gives life reality, the life of a kentuki is real. Schweblin familiarises the reader by artful degrees, introducing us to dwellers and keepers around the world, all reacting differently to the new gizmos. For Emilia in Peru, globalisation has meant profound loss; her grown-up son has been "snatched away" to Hong Kong for a glittering career. When he gives her a connection, she turns on her computer and wakes up in a flat in Germany, where she enjoys being a pet bunny for a young woman: attention at last, and day-to-day intimacy. In Mexico, purposeless Alina finds herself choosing between a crow and a dragon for "the miraculous distraction" of unboxing a new product. In Antigua, a stifled little boy called Marvin who is grieving for his mother wakes up at the top of the globe and goes looking for snow: "At least in this other life, he wouldn't let himself be locked up." Italian Enzo falls into easy companionship with the mole that follows him around his greenhouse. And the consequences of capitalism never stop evolving: in Zagreb Grigor starts a business buying and tending connections through multiple tablets, so he can offer tailor-made experiences to those who want more consumer choice than the market officially offers. There has always been a tinge of horror to Schweblin's work, and here she gets full effect from violent interludes where the connections go sour. That hoary staple of an inanimate object coming alive can be just as frightening when you've paid for it to happen - even, or perhaps especially, when it's a cuddly panda rolling closer with unknown intent. But as she works through the implications of her premise in a nimble, fast-moving narrative, what's most impressive is the way she foregrounds her characters' inner hopes and fears. The kentuki can hear and translate speech, but only respond with animal-appropriate squeaks or purrs, so the first issue is always communication: whether dweller and keeper will connect in the wider world. For Alina, the relationship is about control. She wants to keep her crow as nothing more than a toy, but gradually it becomes the conduit and eventually target for her rage and shame. Marvin finds he has more power and agency when negotiating the world as a kentuki: "Marvin was no longer a boy with a dragon; he was a dragon with a boy inside him." When the characters happen by chance to glimpse their kentuki selves, they feel an overwhelming tenderness for the ball of plastic and felt that is the vessel for their consciousness. In a disassociated world, they are seeing themselves at last. Like Mohsin Hamid's Exit West, in which magical doors act as portals out of conflict zones, Little Eyes has much to say about connection and empathy in a globalised world. On a personal level, its investigation into solitude and online experience becomes only more poignant in a global lockdown. Marvin has never seen snow; he longs to roll his little dragon into an untouched snowbank, to leave his mark. It would be "just like touching the other end of the world with your own fingertips". If a virtual reality is all we can have, we will still reach out to explore its limits.
Kirkus Review
A nuanced exploration of anonymous connection and distant intimacy in our heavily accessible yet increasingly isolated lives. Schweblin, a canny observer of both the better and less-savory angels of our nature, asks: Would you rather be a "keeper," inviting an unknown observer into your home to view your daily routines and private habits through the camera eyes of a "kentuki," a kind of fuzzy robot animal companion and the latest technocraze, or would you prefer to be a "dweller," the anonymous controller on the other end, rolling on little rubber wheels through the life of a stranger? Kentukis take the form of animals--crows, dragons, and most aptly, moles; they're slickly packaged, expensive, desirable, and have the capacity for only a single connection. We spy on a number of these transglobal connections, some brief, as with the Barcelona nursing home director who buys kentukis for his residents, while others span months and are followed throughout the book. One such relationship begins with a dweller in Lima, who displaces the maternal feelings she can't seem to connect to her adult son onto a young German woman, a keeper, whose abundant affection for her rabbit kentuki gives the Lima woman a sense of belonging. As happens with many new technologies we blithely attach to our lives, few users have really considered the potential consequences of the arrangement before entering into it. But everything imaginable happens through kentukis--adventure, love, rejection, extortion, exploitation, and even more inventive depravities. As the firecracker ending reminds us, with our real and virtual lives increasingly blurred, any one of those moments could be our own. Capacious, touching, and disquieting, this is not-so-speculative fiction for an overnetworked and underconnected age. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
Battery-driven, camera-equipped stuffed animals with their own chargers, kentuki are not toys. From crow to bunny to mole, each is decidedly someone--some mysterious observer--with whom its so-called keeper builds a relationship. As they roll around asserting themselves from Lima to Umbertide to South Bend, kentuki unsettle the lives of the various characters whose stories are woven together here, from restless Alina, accompanying her artist boyfriend to Oaxaca on his first big grant, to the divorced Enzo, compelled by an overbearing psychologist to take on one of these creepy critters for the sake of his son, who hates the thing. As situations escalate, readers will be fascinated by the kentuki-human interactions, which smartly reveal how hungry we are for connection in a technology-bent world. VERDICT Of a piece with Schweblin's elliptical Fever Dream and the disturbing story collection A Mouthful of Birds, both runners-up for the Man Booker International Prize, this jittery eye-opener will appeal to a wide range of readers.