October 24, 2016
In her pulsating debut, Schweblin tells the story of Amanda, a young mother dying in a hospital, who talks to a neighborhood boy, David, as he sits by her bedside. David has Amanda recount the events leading up to her sudden illness—in search of, as he says, “the worms” that caused her ailment—and the result is a swirling narrative packed with dream logic and bizarre coincidences, where souls shift from sick bodies to healthy hosts and poisonous toxins seep under the skin upon contact with the grass. As Amanda and her daughter, Nina, try to settle in at their vacation home away from the city, they become entangled with Carla, David’s mother, who appears at random intervals and spins wild tales of her son. After a frightening encounter with David, Amanda throws Carla and the boy out of her home, yet before long, the trio of women are reunited, and from her future hospital bed, a semilucid Amanda tries to remember how this meeting resulted in her death spiral. Powered by an unreliable narrator—is Amanda imagining David by her side?—Schweblin guides her reader through a nightmare scenario with amazing skill.
October 15, 2017
Schweblin, who is Buenos Aires-born and now lives in Berlin, makes her English-language novel debut, thanks to McDowell's crisp translation. Worms, migrating souls, unseen toxins, and deformed children punctuate a mysterious dialog between Amanda, a dying woman in an emergency clinic, and David, a boy not her son. The print version uses italics to distinguish David's part of the conversation from Amanda's; here, veteran narrator Hillary Huber impressively, instantly, adapts her voice as necessary. Amanda and David take turns reconstructing an elliptical recent past that begins "a few days ago" when Amanda met David's mother, Carla, at a lake house. Amanda adds another narrative layer, sharing Carla's story from six years previous when David fell devastatingly ill after drinking from a poisoned stream. Saving his body cleaves his soul, the consequences of which lead inexplicably to Amanda's daughter Nina. VERDICT Part unreliable nightmare, part dysfunctional confession, part ecoparable, Schweblin's slim title should prove irresistible to contemporary world literature aficionados. ["Schweblin's surreal debut novel will be a breath of fresh air": LJ 1/17 starred review of the Riverhead hc.]--Terry Hong, Smithsonian BookDragon, Washington, DC
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