(Books of The Times)
In the 1940s, the great pediatrician and psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott became a regular at a small London bookshop. Biographies were his chief interest. It didn’t matter whose; he read them all — books about soldiers, scientists, actors. Amazed, the bookseller once asked him how he kept up such a pace.
“Oh, I’m only interested up to the age of 5,” Winnicott reportedly replied.
Childhood, and its contusions, are also the governing preoccupations of Argentine writer Samanta Schweblin. Her stories are obsessed with notions of purity and danger; with the ways people can be deformed, very early on, in the name of tenderness, teaching and care.
All this without a whisper of sentimentality. Schweblin is among the most acclaimed Spanish-language writers of her generation. She has said her love of literature came from American writers like John Cheever and Raymond Carver. (You might also detect the influence of her contemporaries Kelly Link and Jesse Ball.) But, to me, her true ancestor could only be David Lynch; her tales are woven out of dread, doubles and confident loose ends.
“Mouthful of Birds,” a collection of 20 stories, has just been published in English. It follows the success of “Fever Dream” (2017) (both seamlessly translated by Megan McDowell), a dialogue between a poisoned woman and a young boy who has information about what is killing her.
It’s a mournful, terrifying book — classic horror meets eco-thriller, a story about the ferocity of maternal love and its inadequacies in the face of a world we have destroyed. The original title of the novel was “Distancia de Rescate” — “Rescue Distance” — after the dying woman’s term for how far she would allow her child to roam.
The new collection is impressive, but it lacks the finish of “Fever Dream.” It contains three perfect stories (“Headlights,” “Mouthful of Birds,” “Toward Happy Civilization”), three stinkers and a handful of exploratory sketches. There’s a feeling of peeking into Schweblin’s notebook, of watching her early experiments with technique (this book was originally published before the novel). She can be oblique, as in “Slowing Down,” a story about aging (I think?), then blunt, as in “Heads Against Concrete,” with its opening line: “If you pound a person’s head against concrete — even if you’re doing it only so they’ll come to their senses — you will very likely end up hurting them.”
These stories spiral into their own circles of madness, but they all belong to the same universe. Odd plot points repeat: mysterious holes in the ground, violence to animals, violence to children, violence to children disguised as animals. They begin in barren landscapes, on empty plains and steppes, on interrupted journeys. There are grotesque parodies of family life (a pair of kidnappers treat their prisoners with the loving pride of parents), parodies of work (a woman’s job requires her to lie facedown on a table and have her leg hair ritually plucked away by six beauticians). The desperate desire to bear children recurs but so too does ambivalence, even revulsion. One woman decides she does not want to be pregnant and wills her belly to shrink and shrink until she finally spits out the baby — “the size of an almond” — into a jar, to wait for the future. Maybe.
The clearest line of continuity is in the dialogue, in how the characters communicate — or don’t, rather. There are strains of Beckett and Pinter in the way Schweblin’s people use so many words to say so little. They have a fondness for digging holes in the ground, to hide in, and they use language to the same effect.
This is to say nothing of the perverse ways people speak to themselves. In the title story, a man discovers that his teenage daughter has taken to eating live pet birds. He is repulsed when he catches her at it for the first time, when he hears the bird scream and sees her bloodstained mouth smiling in shy apology. But he quickly begins explaining it away to himself: “I thought about how, considering there are people who eat people, eating live birds wasn’t so bad. Also, from a natural point of view it was healthier than drugs, and from a social one, it was easier to hide than a pregnancy at 13.” Schweblin’s characters constantly talk themselves out of their perceptions, out of reality.
Schweblin herself stopped talking when she was 12 years old. She has said she was overwhelmed by the gulf between what she wanted to say and what she thought people could understand. The school principal required a doctor’s note testifying that she was normal in order for her to continue with classes. A psychotherapist complied, stating that she was extremely normal but had a “complete disinterest” in the world around her.
That diagnosis of aristocratic disdain must have been a gift to a precocious 12-year-old. What makes Schweblin so startling as a writer, however, what makes her rare and important, is that she is impelled not by mere talent or ambition but by vision, and that vision emerges from intense concern with the world, with the hidden cruelties in our relationships with all that is vulnerable — children, rivers, language, one another.
Look again at any of her stories — about these bizarre rituals and stupid jobs, the baroque torture of animals, the asphyxiation of children — strip away all that seems fantastic, keep only that mirror-smooth prose, and what do you see? Schweblin’s dark farces just might awaken you to some of your own.
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Publication Notes:
‘Mouthful of Birds: Stories’
By Samanta Schweblin
Translated from the Spanish by Megan McDowell
228 pages. Riverhead Books. $26.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.