Samanta Schweblin is one of a generation of South American female writers whose willingness to experiment with language, content and form has made them some of the most interesting and necessarily provocative voices in literature today (other names include Fernanda Melchor, Maria Gainza, Ariana Harwicz and Pola Oloixarac). While their predominantly male forebears staked out the territory of magic realism, these newer writers have arguably shown themselves to be even more innovative, utilising elements of autofiction, reportage and literary postmodernism in their quest to create a literature that offers a uniquely critical perspective on our times.
With her predilection for the dark and discomfiting, Schweblin sits closest to fellow Argentinian Mariana Enríquez, whose stories also occupy a queasy interstitial realm in which reality and nightmare can be difficult to distinguish. Schweblin’s first work to be translated into English was the 2014 novella Fever Dream, which made the shortlist for the 2017 Booker International. Fever Dream uses the tools of psychological horror to tell a story about the destructive power of agricultural chemical companies, and the economic and political vested interests that afford them protection. She followed this with the 2018 science fiction novel Little Eyes, which employed a fractured narrative technique to create a highly engaging and thought-provoking commentary on the surveillance state and our willing participation in our own subjugation. In this new collection, winner in the US of a National book award, Schweblin steps back out on the shifting sands of literary horror that characterised Fever Dream, with seven stories of domestic suspense and psychological imbalance.
Generational shifts are again explored in Forty Centimetres Squared, in which a woman returns to the city of her birth after a failed attempt to settle in a more prosperous country. Forced to rely on the goodwill of her mother-in-law, the narrator wanders in the dark of a neighbourhood that has become strangely unfamiliar, resenting the demands being made on her by the older woman, yet finally coming to realise just how much they have in common.
The corrosive effects of blocked trauma are played out in It Happens All the Time in This House, the strange, elliptical tale of Mr Weimer, who to the consternation of his wife still cannot bear to part with the clothing of their long-dead son. A missing child is also the central, contested subject matter of Breath from the Depths, the longest and therefore pivotal story in the collection. Lola is unwell and her memory is becoming unreliable. She is determined to die, and in preparation is engaged in the seemingly endless process of boxing up her possessions. Her husband spends most of his time in the garden, and Lola comes increasingly to believe he is hiding something from her. What is the real significance of the cocoa powder pushed right to the back of the kitchen cupboard, the hand wrench lent to a neighbour and never returned, the repeated visitations from the police?
At the centre of everything, there is the supermarket incident, which Lola insists she can remember perfectly and yet refuses to describe. The atmosphere of this story is claustrophobic in a way that instantly recalls Fever Dream: the endless circling of salient facts, a protagonist determined to remember but equally determined to forget. Here, as in Fever Dream, the power of the narrative lies in the things that are unsaid, or deliberately hidden, or misunderstood by the protagonist. Unfortunately, here there is no catharsis; the circularity and sense of stagnation is unremitting, the author’s determination to conceal the full reality of what has occurred making for a story that is oddly static.
An Unlucky Man is more dramatically successful and, for me, the highlight of the collection. The story’s narrator relives the events of her eighth birthday, the day her three-year-old sister deliberately swallows a cupful of disinfectant in a bid for attention. Chaos and panic ensue as she is driven to the emergency room. Left to her own devices in the hospital waiting room, the young narrator encounters a man who asks strange questions and to whom she finds herself revealing that she has no knickers on. The man takes her to a shopping mall, where together they conspire in the theft of some new and pretty underwear. Schweblin’s skill in juggling perspectives results in a narrative that is simultaneously very funny and deeply disturbing.
Conveyed to English-language readers in the seamlessly poetical renditions of the author’s regular translator Megan McDowell, these curiously addictive, tightly wound stories are as compelling as they are alienating. Schweblin’s tendency to understatement, forever flirting with entropic decline yet never entirely capitulating to it, makes her latest work an original and provoking contribution to the literature of unease.
• Seven Empty Houses by Samanta Schweblin, translated by Megan McDowell, is published by Oneworld (£12.99). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
