Fever Dream (Schweblin)

Fever Dream 
Samanta Schweblin, 2014 (Engl. trans., Megan McDowell, 2017)
Penguin Publishing
192 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780399184598


Summary
A young woman named Amanda lies dying in a rural hospital clinic.

A boy named David sits beside her. She’s not his mother. He's not her child. Together, they tell a haunting story of broken souls, toxins, and the power and desperation of family.     
 
Fever Dream is a nightmare come to life, a ghost story for the real world, a love story and a cautionary tale.

One of the freshest new voices to come out of the Spanish language and translated into English for the first time, Samanta Schweblin creates an aura of strange psychological menace and otherworldly reality in this absorbing, unsettling, taut novel. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—1978
• Where—Buenos Aires, Argentina
• Education—University of Buenos Aires
• Awards—Fondo Nacional de las Artes; Concurso Nacional Haroldo Conti; Casa de las Americas
• Currently—lives in Berlin, Germany


Samanta Schweblin was born in Buenos Aires in 1978 but now lives in Berlin, Germany. Her work has been translated into 20 different languages, and Granta named her one of the 22 best writers in Spanish under the age of 35.

Work and awards
In 2001 Schweblin was granted her first award by the Fondo Nacional de las Artes (National Fund of the Arts). In that same year, her first book "El nucleo del Disturbio" (2002) garnered her the first prize of the Concurso Nacional Haroldo Conti.(National Contest Haroldo Conti). In 2008 she obtained the prize "Casa de las Americas" for her storybook "La Furia de las pestes."

She was included in the anthologies "Quand elles se glissent dans la peau d'un homme" (2007), "Una terraza propia" 2006), "La joven guardia" (2005), and "Cuentos Argentinos" (2004), among others.

Some of her stories have been translated into English, French, Serbian, Swedish, and Dutch, and published in magazines and other cultural forums. An English translation of her story "Killing a Dog" was published in the Summer 2009 issue of the London-based quarterly newspaper The Drawbridge. (From Wikipedia. Retrieved 1/20/2017.)

Book Reviews
I picked up Fever Dream in the wee hours, and a low, sick thrill took hold of me as I read it. I was checking the locks in my apartment by page thirty. By the time I finished the book, I couldn’t bring myself to look out the windows…. [T]he genius of Fever Dream is less in what it says than in how Schweblin says it, with a design at once so enigmatic and so disciplined that the book feels as if it belongs to a new literary genre altogether.
Jia Tolentino - The New Yorker


Schweblin writes with such restraint that I never questioned a sentence or a statement. This is the power of the short novel: Stripped down to its essentials, her story all but glows. Which makes sense, after all. It's toxic.
Lily Meyer - NPR.org


A remarkable accomplishment in literary suspense.
New York Journal of Books


An absorbing and inventive tale.... Schweblin is a fine mythmaker, singular in her own fantastical artistry.
Houston Chronicle


Samanta Schweblin’s electric story reads like a Fever Dream.
Vanity Fair


Never have I ever been so afraid to read a book right before bed.
Marie Claire


[A] pulsating debut, Schweblin tells the story of Amanda, a young mother dying in a hospital, who talks to a neighborhood boy, David.... Powered by an unreliable narrator—is Amanda imagining David by her side?—Schweblin guides her reader through a nightmare scenario with amazing skill.
Publishers Weekly


(Starred review.) [A] breath of fresh air.... The hallucinatory flow of the dialog moves the story along quickly, and readers may have to turn back to find a missing puzzle piece. Those who are willing to stay with this book will find the experience like no other and well worth the effort. —Kate Gray, Boston P.L., MA
Library Journal


(Starred review.) A taut, exquisite page-turner vibrating with existential distress and cumulative dread.... 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.
Kirkus Reviews

Discussion Questions
We'll add publisher questions if and when they're available; in the meantime, use our LitLovers talking points to start a discussion for Fever Dream...then take off on your own:

1. What was your experience reading Fever Dream? What has happened—or is happening—in this book? 

2. At one point, Amanda says to David, "There’s only darkness, and you’re talking into my ear. I don’t even know if this is really happening," Is the conversation really happening?

3. Why is David pushing Amanda to tell him the story? How reliable is she as a storyteller / narrator? Is she at all grounded in reality?

4. Why does David continue to mention the worms? What are the worms? What do they signify?

5. What do we learn about the state of Argentine agriculture and its impact on the surrounding citizens?

6. The novel's Spanish (and original) title is "Rescue Distance," a phrase that recurs in the novel. What does it mean? What is a safe rescue distance?

7. Can you unravel the structure of this novel—a story nestled within a story, wrapped in yet another story?

8. It has been suggested that the novel's unstable form, as well as its mood of dread and uncertainty, is a perfect reflection of the Argentinians' insecurities, particularly those who live in the countryside. Discuss the way the novel marries form to subject.

(Questions by LitLovers. Please feel free to use them, online or off, with attribution. Thanks.)

top of page (summary)