Available:*
Material Type | Library | Call Number | Item Barcode | Location |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Book | Searching... Andover - Memorial Hall Library | SHORT STORY SCHWEBLIN | 31330009257159 | Searching... Unknown |
| Book | Searching... Boxford Town Library | FIC SCHWEBLIN | 32115002191243 | Searching... Unknown |
| Book | Searching... Carlisle - Gleason Public Library | F SCHWEBLIN | 32117002145567 | Searching... Unknown |
| Book | Searching... Chelmsford Public Library | FIC/SCHWEBLIN | 31480011612261 | Searching... Unknown |
| Book | Searching... Georgetown Peabody Library | FIC SCHWEBLIN | 32120001408804 | Searching... Unknown |
| Book | Searching... Groveland - Langley-Adams Library | FIC SCHWEBLIN | 32121000933891 | Searching... Unknown |
| Book | Searching... Haverhill Public Library | FIC/SCHWEBLIN S | 31479007572075 | Searching... Unknown |
| Book | Searching... Ipswich Public Library | FIC SCHWEBLIN, SAMANTHA | 32122002980377 | Searching... Unknown |
| Book | Searching... Lowell - Pollard Memorial Library | FIC SCHWEBLIN | 31481005639120 | Searching... Unknown |
| Book | Searching... Newbury Town Library | SCH SC | 32127001338402 | Searching... Unknown |
| Book | Searching... Newburyport Public Library | FIC SCHWEBLIN S | 32128004130341 | Searching... Unknown |
| Book | Searching... Rockport Public Library | FIC SCHWEBLIN COLLECTION | 32129002544053 | Searching... Unknown |
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Summary
Summary
Winner of the 2022 National Book Award for Translated Literature
A blazing new story collection that will make you feel like the house is collapsing in on you, from the 3 time International Booker Prize finalist, "lead[ing] a vanguard of Latin American writers forging their own 21st-century canon." - O , the Oprah magazine
The seven houses in these seven stories are strange. A person is missing, or a truth, or memory; some rooms are enticing, some unmoored, others empty. But in Samanta Schweblin's tense, visionary tales, something always creeps back inside: a ghost, a fight, trespassers, a list of things to do before you die, a child's first encounter with darkness or the fallibility of parents.
In each story, twists and turns will unnerve and surprise: Schweblin never takes the expected path and instead digs under the skin, revealing surreal truths about our sense of home, of belonging, and of the fragility of our connections with others. This is a masterwork from one of our most brilliant modern writers.
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
International Booker Prize finalist Schweblin (Fever Dream) centers her undercooked collection on families defined by an absence, whether physical or of intimacy, memory, or sanity. In the eerie and propulsive opener, "None of That," a young woman and her disturbed mother get stuck in a wealthy neighborhood. After the mother connives her way into the landowner's house, she compulsively tidies and catalogs the woman's belongings. In "Out," a woman flees her apartment wearing a bathrobe during a fight with her husband, only to have a disconcerting night on the town with a man who claims to be the building's "escapist." Unfortunately, Schweblin's stories are far more evocative than substantive, and their sense of uncanny weightlessness--told in brisk, nondescript prose, featuring nameless and indistinct narrators and aimless plots--diminishes intrigue and leaves the reader hungry for deeper imaginative leaps. The exception is "Breath from the Depths," which follows Lola, a retiree, as she descends into dementia and feuds with the young mother across the street. Schweblin can evoke a mesmerizing, eerie tone, but too often does little more than that. (Oct.)
Guardian Review
Samanta Schweblin is one of a generation of South American female writers whose willingness to experiment with language, content and form has made them some of the most interesting and necessarily provocative voices in literature today (other names include Fernanda Melchor, Maria Gainza, Ariana Harwicz and Pola Oloixarac). While their predominantly male forebears staked out the territory of magic realism, these newer writers have arguably shown themselves to be even more innovative, utilising elements of autofiction, reportage and literary postmodernism in their quest to create a literature that offers a uniquely critical perspective on our times. With her predilection for the dark and discomfiting, Schweblin sits closest to fellow Argentinian Mariana Enríquez, whose stories also occupy a queasy interstitial realm in which reality and nightmare can be difficult to distinguish. Schweblin's first work to be translated into English was the 2014 novella Fever Dream, which made the shortlist for the 2017 Booker International. Fever Dream uses the tools of psychological horror to tell a story about the destructive power of agricultural chemical companies, and the economic and political vested interests that afford them protection. She followed this with the 2018 science fiction novel Little Eyes, which employed a fractured narrative technique to create a highly engaging and thought-provoking commentary on the surveillance state and our willing participation in our own subjugation. In this new collection, winner in the US of a National book award, Schweblin steps back out on the shifting sands of literary horror that characterised Fever Dream, with seven stories of domestic suspense and psychological imbalance. Generational shifts are again explored in Forty Centimetres Squared, in which a woman returns to the city of her birth after a failed attempt to settle in a more prosperous country. Forced to rely on the goodwill of her mother-in-law, the narrator wanders in the dark of a neighbourhood that has become strangely unfamiliar, resenting the demands being made on her by the older woman, yet finally coming to realise just how much they have in common. The corrosive effects of blocked trauma are played out in It Happens All the Time in This House, the strange, elliptical tale of Mr Weimer, who to the consternation of his wife still cannot bear to part with the clothing of their long-dead son. A missing child is also the central, contested subject matter of Breath from the Depths, the longest and therefore pivotal story in the collection. Lola is unwell and her memory is becoming unreliable. She is determined to die, and in preparation is engaged in the seemingly endless process of boxing up her possessions. Her husband spends most of his time in the garden, and Lola comes increasingly to believe he is hiding something from her. What is the real significance of the cocoa powder pushed right to the back of the kitchen cupboard, the hand wrench lent to a neighbour and never returned, the repeated visitations from the police? At the centre of everything, there is the supermarket incident, which Lola insists she can remember perfectly and yet refuses to describe. The atmosphere of this story is claustrophobic in a way that instantly recalls Fever Dream: the endless circling of salient facts, a protagonist determined to remember but equally determined to forget. Here, as in Fever Dream, the power of the narrative lies in the things that are unsaid, or deliberately hidden, or misunderstood by the protagonist. Unfortunately, here there is no catharsis; the circularity and sense of stagnation is unremitting, the author's determination to conceal the full reality of what has occurred making for a story that is oddly static. An Unlucky Man is more dramatically successful and, for me, the highlight of the collection. The story's narrator relives the events of her eighth birthday, the day her three-year-old sister deliberately swallows a cupful of disinfectant in a bid for attention. Chaos and panic ensue as she is driven to the emergency room. Left to her own devices in the hospital waiting room, the young narrator encounters a man who asks strange questions and to whom she finds herself revealing that she has no knickers on. The man takes her to a shopping mall, where together they conspire in the theft of some new and pretty underwear. Schweblin's skill in juggling perspectives results in a narrative that is simultaneously very funny and deeply disturbing. Conveyed to English-language readers in the seamlessly poetical renditions of the author's regular translator Megan McDowell, these curiously addictive, tightly wound stories are as compelling as they are alienating. Schweblin's tendency to understatement, forever flirting with entropic decline yet never entirely capitulating to it, makes her latest work an original and provoking contribution to the literature of unease.
Kirkus Review
Empty homes, emptied lives, and emptying memories: Life's--particularly family life's--many emptinesses and emptyings abound in this ethereal collection. Although its original Spanish publication preceded that of Little Eyes (2020), the author's most recent translation into English, this collection may feel like a progression from McDowell's translations of Schweblin's other works, which dwell more squarely in the fantastic and the speculative, often pushing into nightmare territory, and into a quieter, more human-centered and realism-bound world--though one thrumming with just as much eerie tension, as Schweblin evokes the uncanny in the human rather than placing the human in the uncanny. In "None of That," a woman finally discovers an appreciation for her mother's unusual pastime. In "My Parents and My Children," a man confronts an uncomfortable situation he has been drawn into with his ex-wife and her new boyfriend when she asks him to bring his probably unsound and decidedly nudist parents to visit their children at a rented vacation home. A neighbor considers what might be driving a recurring cycle in "It Happens All the Time in This House," where the woman next door throws her late son's clothes over their fence and her husband comes, unfailingly, to retrieve them. "Breath From the Depths," the collection's emotional pinnacle, introduces Lola, a paranoid and housebound elderly woman who's outlasted her will to live and her capacity to do anything about it, as her memory empties alongside the contents of her home. "Forty Centimeters Squared" finds an unnamed woman, after moving away to Spain, returned to Buenos Aires, her belongings packed in a storage unit and with no home to call her own. "An Unlucky Man" follows a girl whose younger sister's antics have resulted in a trip to the hospital, where she is forgotten and ignored until she meets the unluckiest man in the world in the waiting room, who takes her on a birthday adventure that ends badly but might easily have ended even worse. And, finally, in "Out," a woman steps out of the morass of what appears to be a failing relationship and, for a moment, into new possibilities, guided by a mysterious maintenance man who claims to have been fixing her building's fire escape--a self-described escapist. Seven compelling explorations of vacancy in another perfectly spare and atmospheric translation. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
Originally published in Spain in 2015, this slim collection of stories from the author of Little Eyes (2020) and Fever Dream (2017) is being brought to English-speaking audiences for the first time. The tales take place in familiar settings--homes, suburban neighborhoods, the local shopping mall--but unsettling elements threaten to upend these commonplace locales. In the longest story, an old woman named Lola is waiting to die, content to let her husband do most of the work around the house. But she becomes increasingly unsettled when he forms a bond with a boy who has just moved in next door with his mother. In another story, an undercurrent of dread and unease permeates the narrative when an eight-year-old girl wanders off with a male stranger to pick out new underwear after her family has to rush her younger sister to the hospital. Strange and surrounded by an aura of potential danger, Schweblin's stories will appeal to lovers of unsettling, literary short stories.
Library Journal Review
Thrice an International Booker Prize finalist, most recently for Mouthful of Birds, Buenos Aires--born, Berlin-based Schweblin made her name with this collection, appearing for the first time in English. While these seven stories don't necessarily exhibit the shimmering, otherworldly language for which she is famous, the inventive weirdness is there. A woman can't defuse her mother's obsession with home- and yard-invasion, meant to correct bad decorating and the mistreatment of objects. An ex-wife can't abide the convention-flouting ways of her former parents-in-law--now they're dancing naked in the backyard--but the kids seem to love it. A husband gingerly retrieves his dead son's clothes, repeatedly tossed in a neighbor's yard by his wife. In the longest, most affecting story, an ailing woman who wants to die watches enviously as her husband befriends the boy next door. Not only has her world shrunk down to pettiness, but it's clear that her hold on reality has slipped. Throughout these sorrowing, often death-tinged stories, there's emptiness--primarily of meaning and affection. VERDICT A sure bet for Schweblin fans and connoisseurs of off-kilter worlds, though some readers may feel distanced.