kentuckis (samanta schweblin)

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?

fever dream [samanta schweblin]

Fever Dream has recently landed on the International Booker Prize shortlist. From a publishing point of view you can see the attraction. It’s short, sharp and more or less to the point. You can read it one sitting and the world it creates is hypnotic. The book does possess a mesmeric quality, assisted by the dialectical approach of question and answer. There are effectively two narrators, and their combined quest to find out ‘what happened’ drives the increasingly strange narrative forwards. A woman, on the point of death, is talking to someone, relating a story about how she’s fallen into a feverish state shorty after going away for a holiday in the countryside with her young daughter. There’s an eco-reference, which may or may not go over the heads of it’s non-Latino audience. The implied cause of the fever, which seems to be about to kill her, is the water in the fields, which has been contaminated by the use of agro-chemicals. This reflects the shocking problems of the agriculture industry in both Argentina and Uruguay, and perhaps further afield, where the groundwater has become so contaminated that rivers have become poisonous and much of the local produce contains toxins. Nature has been turned on its head.  

Fever Dream is a concise, compelling and clever piece of storytelling. Yet, at the end of the novel, finished in the bath, I actually found myself shouting out loud: “Cortazar”. Because in a way, this book is a tribute or a riff on the work of the great Argentine writer, Cortazar. Cortazar’s stories tightroped along the edge of reality and fantasy. The unstable narrator, the feverish warping of the reality established within the story’s world: all of this was, to a certain extent, perfected by Cortazar. It’s perhaps invidious to make comparisons, except that Schweblin, as an Argentine writer, will surely be aware that her novel has so much in common with his work. Fever Dream is a fine piece of writing and will do well, but I would urge anyone who has enjoyed Schweblin’s novel to get a hold of Cortazar’s short stories, and sink your teeth into them.