Review by New York Times Review
To call Schweblin's novella eerie and hallucinatory is only to gesture at its compact power; the fantastical here simply dilates a reality we begin to accept as terrifying and true. A woman named Amanda lies on a hospital gurney, recounting her story to David, a boy who pushes her to relive the events that have brought her there, wrapped in the rough sheets of her deathbed, able to talk but unable to move. She describes traveling with her young daughter to a vacation rental outside the capital and meeting David's mother, who immediately insinuates that something so monstrous has happened to David that she no longer considers him her son. "The first time they put him in my arms, I was so anxious. I was convinced he was missing a finger," she says, remembering when she had a new mother's ordinary fears. "What I wouldn't give now for David to simply be missing a finger." The tale that follows is a swift descent into phantasmagoria, as the dialogue between Amanda and David - translated into lucid English by McDowell - turns into a cleareyed reminiscence of horror and a struggle for narrative control. "How different are you now from the David of six years ago?" Amanda asks. "What did you do that was so terrible your own mother no longer accepts you as hers?" Damaged children, a degraded earth, souls that move between bodies but never find rest: Schweblin's book is suffused with haunting images and big questions, and in Amanda she places a mother's all-consuming love and fear for her child. Amanda remembers how she would constantly measure the "rescue distance" that separated her from her daughter. As the distance tightens, as Amanda feels that her daughter is closer than ever, she will learn the grim and fateful lesson that maternal instincts count for little in an insidiously poisoned world.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [January 1, 2017]
Review by Booklist Review
Schweblin's first novel tells a frenetic, unnerving tale. A young mother, Amanda, is afflicted by a sudden illness and accepts that death is imminent. As she waits in her hospital bed, she hears the hovering voice of a young boy, David, who guides her as she recounts the events leading to her current dire situation. After arriving at a rural vacation home with her daughter, Nina, Amanda strikes up a friendship with their alluring neighbor, Carla, a local who is revealed to be David's mother. Carla shares with Amanda an unusual story about her son and her efforts to save him after he was poisoned. Amanda, at first dubious, becomes increasingly troubled by both mother and son and makes plans to cut their vacation short and return home. But things go awry when Amanda decides to bid Carla farewell. Schweblin's sparse narrative, both familiar and mysterious, quickly grows in intensity as the hazy whispers of self-doubt and death itself descend. A thought-provoking story that provides ample opportunity for readers to grapple with its unanswered questions.--Strauss, Leah Copyright 2016 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
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. (Jan.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
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 eco-parable, -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 © Copyright 2017. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
A taut, exquisite page-turner vibrating with existential distress and cumulative dread.Schweblins English-language debut, translated by the eminently capable McDowell, plays out as a tense, sustained dialogue in an emergency clinic somewhere in the Argentinian countryside between a dying woman named Amanda and her dispassionate interlocutor, David, who, we quickly ascertain, is a child but seems to be neither her child nor any clear relation to her. At Davids ever more insistent prompting, Amanda recounts a series of events from the apparently recent past, but as he pushes her to recall whatever trauma has landed her in her terminal state, a struggle for narrative control ensues. Though Amanda gradually gains the power to tell her story in her own waydespite Davids frequent protestations that she's dwelling on irrelevant details that wont help her understand her circumstancesthe impotence and inchoate dangers that underscore the conversation in the clinic ricochet throughout the larger story being told, of what brought her there and why David is with her. Even with the small freedom to tell the deathbed tale she wants to tell, she moves inexorably in the retelling toward the moment when death became inevitable, just as time, in the clinic, creeps closer to the realization of that death. While the book resides in the realm of the uncanny, its concerns are all too real. Once the top blows off Schweblins chest of horrors, into which wed been peeking through a masterfully manipulated crack, what remains is an unsettling and significant dissection of maternal love and fear, of the devastation weve left to the future, and of our inability to escape or control the unseen and unimagined threats all around us. In a literary thriller of the highest order, Schweblin teases out the underlying anxieties of being vulnerable and loving vulnerable creatures and of being an inhabitant of a planet with an increasingly uncertain future. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
