New York: Riverhead Books, 2017. Translated by Megan McDowell. 183 pages.

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I found Samanta Schweblin’s Fever Dream more interesting as an experiment in form than enjoyable to read, though this is no dispositive statement about its merits. To borrow Dwight McDonald‘s over-determined categories, the masscult reviewer tells you whether by reading a novel or watching a movie or TV show, you will have fun. The midcult reviewer tells you whether the work is clever, thus appealing to the pretensions to cleverness of your aspirational social class (though as Bourdieu pointed out, the elite the middle classes aspire to are bifurcated between those with economic capital, and those with cultural capital, which is why you don’t see Trump cabinet members carrying around the latest Jonathan Franzen.)

But not all books make you laugh or inspire heroic admiration of their main characters. Fever Dream aims to terrify and disorient us—and at least in part, terrify us by disorienting us. It is one of three spooky books I’ve read this year from up-and-coming autoras argentinas, the other two being Things We Lost in the Fire: Stories by Mariana Enriquez (reviewed here), and Savage Theories by Pola Oloixarac, but whereas Enriquez and Oloixarac primarily take la capital (Buenos Aires) as their setting, Fever Dream finds its protagonists trapped in a remote rural town. (On multiple occasions the main characters attempt to leave the town . . . and fail! Mwahaha!)

The novel is framed as a dialogue, the first participant of which is a woman, Amanda, dying in a hospital bed of some mysterious illness—“the worms” (!)—which, as the story progresses, seems to be afflicted every living thing in the area. Amanda also spends much of her time frantically asking after her little daughter Nina, and unable to remember just how she arrived at this situation. Her unlikely interlocutor is a little boy named David, who is constantly cajoling Amanda to recount her story from the beginning and search its details for clues to the mystery of these “worms” that are gnawing at her body. “This isn’t important,” he says sometimes when she recounts details that aren’t the important things, at other times telling her a particular episode is important, and that she needs to concentrate and remember every detail so they can unravel the mystery. Why these details are important and others are not is a question that is resolved in the course of the story, although I still found the kid to be an unhelpful twerp and his judgments about what was and wasn’t important rather arbitrary. True, he does point Amanda to moment of the [does not finish sentence, since that would be a spoiler], and in a way this framing of the story as the search for a single crucial moment reminds me a little bit of the movie Momento, similarly arranged around a moment.

This mystery, without giving too much away, concerns the sudden sickness that is seen coming down in pets, horses, and eventually people in the rural area where Amanda and Nina are vacationing. Amanda meets Carla, an oddly superstitious woman living nearby who shares terrifying stories about the poison affecting she and her husband’s horses and their son. There is a local medicine woman living in a “Green House” who performs terrible rituals that can save a dying person’s life, but only at the cost of taking something else. There is also the continual worry Amanda shows about losing her daughter Nina, a worry that is embodied in Amanda’s idea of “rescue distance.” Rescue distance is the distance Amanda feels comfortable allowing Nina to be away from here, and one of its unique qualities is that its length varies depending on how insecure Amanda feels at any given moment of the story. As the intensity of the action ratchets up at the end of the story, the rescue distance to tightly wrap around Amanda’s innards, a metaphorical leap that I wasn’t crazy about, to be honest. The purpose of the dynamic between Amanda and Nina seems to be to be to dramatize the insecurity felt by a parent of small children, the constant fear that “something bad will happen,” as Amanda’s mother impressed upon her.

As she narrates her stream of present-tense memories, Amanda jumps backwards and forwards, is alternately lucid and faltering, and at times the little boy takes over as events become too difficult for her to recount. At times she and David jump in and out of narration, or David stops Amanda to complain that she’s wasting time. (Although Amanda often just ignores the little twerp’s demands.) At certain tense moments their dialogue become heightened, charged with vague foreboding of something terrible that’s about to happen.

I would characterize the ending as an ambiguous one that, while it reveals some surprises about the town, leaves certain questions unanswered, the primary one being: What is causing this mysterious sickness? Is it supernatural? Is this town the victim of human created disaster like another Love Canal? This would be consistent with a story in Mariana Enriquez’s story collection, in which environmental pollution likewise causes children to grow strange deformities; while I am not familiar with the history, I would gander that Argentina must have experienced some sort of disaster like that, given that this idea has animated stories by two different Argentinian authors this year. The final images we are left with are of the urban sprawl that Amanda’s husband encounters when he returns to the capital. What does this all mean? What is Schweblin trying to communicate about what has happened to the characters? My curiosity is piqued; this all has to mean something!

Below is my first attempt to use a rubric to grade a book, as discussed in a prior post. Again, this is all just my opinion. If you disagree, take to the Comments and make your case! This site is open to all viewpoints, provided they aren’t out-and-out bigotry or abuse.