Review by 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.
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by 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.)
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Review by 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.
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Review by Kirkus Book 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.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
