As astute and devoted readers will be aware, I was underwhelmed by Fever Dream, Schweblin’s breakthrough novel, now being adapted as a major motion picture. It was smart, but wafer thin, and perhaps in my usual curmudgeonly style I reacted to the hype by putting it down and talking about Cortazar. Kentuckis is also smart and slightly chunkier, albeit still brittle, but on a personal level I found myself warming to it as I got into it. If the subjective experience is of any value.
The novel is a sort of low high concept. A new gizmo, which has a lot in common with the turn-of-the-century Tamagotchi vogue, is on the market. The kentuckis is a cute object which communicates with its owner, albeit non-verbally. It needs charging every night and there are different versions with animal designs, (owl, rabbit, etc). The twist is the ghost in the machine: each kentuckis has an owner but there’s also a shadow owner who is reviewing the data from the kentuckis’ camera on their device. Hence is set up a game of suspense. Who is on the other side? Or if you are a viewer rather than an owner, what is really going on in the world you are being invited to spy on?
It’s great literary device, which allows the writer to talk about globalisation, our obsession with screens, and the vanity of being watched by the all pervasive cameras . Given that the kentuckis can die if they are not recharged on time, and the small vulnerable creatures can go about alone in the world, there is also a lot of scope for dramatic tension, which the novel mines effectively. The kentuckis end up being passive agents of truth, disclosing unpalatable revelations to owners on both sides of the digital divide. What does it mean to ‘be connected’? Schweblin employs her conceit to investigate this modern concept in ways that surprise both subject and reader. As such the conceit is also a sly meta take on the very act of reading: what does the book tell us about the characters? And what do the characters reveal about us, the readers?
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