08/08/2022
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.)
Praise for Seven Empty Houses
"Rejoice! Just when we’re settling into fall, all cozy on the couch with a Netflix show queued up, a new short story collection from Samanta Schweblin is here to spit in your pumpkin spiced latte and drag its nails down the wall. Seven Empty Houses... takes aim at the place we feel safest: home. Darker and more tinged with terror than her breakthrough novel, Fever Dream, this is Schweblin at her sharpest and most ferocious." —New York Times Book Review
"[H]er newest collection may be her most unsettling.... The spectacular and strange stories in Seven Empty Houses, translated by Schweblin’s longtime English translator Megan McDowell, pertain to nothing more mysterious than mistaken perceptions, debilitating grief and the often-torturous passage of time." —Washington Post
"[A] sense of dreamlike menace infuses the linked fictions in Samanta Schweblin’s Seven Empty Houses, beautifully translated from the Spanish by Megan McDowell.... These stories pulse with blood and lust, ego and id, as Schweblin punches above her weight.... Schweblin is at the forefront of emerging Latin American writers, defiant and assured, swaggering among the jungles of sex, love, and politics." —Oprah Daily
"Samanta Schweblin's new short stories take place against familiar everyday scenes. But she twists and turns those moments in unexpected and chilling ways." —NPR
"Nothing is ever quite what it seems in Schweblin’s fiction, and rarely is anything innocuous either... As the title intimates, the domestic environment looms large in these seven stories translated by the incomparable Megan McDowell.... Schweblin crafts a shrieking crescendo of creeping dread and bewilderment.... In Seven Empty Houses we’re firmly steeped in a reality that’s recognisable. This is terror that’s tangible, and it’s all the more frightening for it." —Financial Times
“The proximity to Halloween is appropriate, given Schweblin’s idiosyncratic mode of tense and unsettling literary horror. As in Fever Dream and Little Eyes…something is always creeping around these empty houses.” —The Millions
“Ethereal… Seven compelling explorations of vacancy in another perfectly spare and atmospheric translation.” —Kirkus Reviews
“Evocative.” – Publishers Weekly
“Excellent.” —Bookriot
“Uniquely satisfying.” —LitHub
Praise for Samanta Schweblin
“Weird, wondrous, and wise . . . Samanta Schweblin has perfected the art of pithy literary creepiness, crafting modern fables that tingle the spine and the brain.” —O, the Oprah Magazine
“Genius.” —Jia Tolentino, The New Yorker
“What makes Schweblin so startling as a writer… what makes her rare and important, is that she is impelled not by mere talent or ambition but by vision.” —The New York Times
“Strange and beautiful.” —Tommy Orange
“Sickeningly good.” —Emma Cline
“Mesmerizing.” —The Washington Post
“Tales of somber humor, full of characters who slide into cracks or fall through holes into alternate realities.”—J. M. Coetzee
“Schweblin delivers a skin-prickling masterclass in dread and suspense.” —The Economist
“While Schweblin executes each narrative move with propulsive confidence, as though of course it would not go any other way, it is also impossible to guess where a Schweblin story is going. One of the greatest effects of Schweblin’s writing is the sensation of having a trapdoor kicked open in your own mind—of not knowing this weird space even existed, but of course. There you are.” —Los Angeles Review of Books
“You see how masterfully she handles her prose—a writer in full control on the page. Her language is economical, yet supremely effective at creating a tense, claustrophobic atmosphere; shadows lurk behind the words left unwritten, the sentences that refuse to reveal the hidden things just around the corner. Rarely, if ever, is the horror named. It is simply felt. Nothing can be trusted.” —New York
“A master of elegant and uncanny fiction . . . Schweblin is gifted at treating the otherworldly with a matter-of-fact attitude, writing about the surreal as if it were unremarkable. . . . And her writing, beautifully translated by Megan McDowell, is consistently perfect; she can evoke more feelings in one sentence than many writers can in a whole story. . . . A stunning achievement from a writer whose potential is beginning to seem limitless.” —NPR
“Chilling . . . A master of the macabre . . . Her particular genius lies in the fact that there’s something inherently savage and ungovernable about her work: each of these eerie, shocking stories crouches like a tiny feral beast, luring you in with false promises of docility, only to then sideswipe you with sharpened claws and bared fangs.” —Financial Times
10/01/2022
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.
Seven talented narrators capture the unsettling and weird nature of this collection of seven stories. The longest story is deftly narrated by Mexican actor Yareli Arizmendi. Lola, an elderly woman who is losing her mind and wants to die, can't manage to make it happen. The talented Daisy Guevara narrates the most nerve-wracking story in which she convincingly voices an 8-year-old girl who is led away from a hospital waiting room by a man whose motives are unclear. Other stories deal with nonsensical, unsettling, borderline demented behavior that will unnerve listeners, prompting them to search for meaning in the thought-provoking collection. Each narrator rises to the challenge of interpreting the arresting—and sometimes even funny—situations the characters find themselves in. A.M. 2022 National Book Award Winner © AudioFile 2022, Portland, Maine
Seven talented narrators capture the unsettling and weird nature of this collection of seven stories. The longest story is deftly narrated by Mexican actor Yareli Arizmendi. Lola, an elderly woman who is losing her mind and wants to die, can't manage to make it happen. The talented Daisy Guevara narrates the most nerve-wracking story in which she convincingly voices an 8-year-old girl who is led away from a hospital waiting room by a man whose motives are unclear. Other stories deal with nonsensical, unsettling, borderline demented behavior that will unnerve listeners, prompting them to search for meaning in the thought-provoking collection. Each narrator rises to the challenge of interpreting the arresting—and sometimes even funny—situations the characters find themselves in. A.M. 2022 National Book Award Winner © AudioFile 2022, Portland, Maine
2022-10-12
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.
