Fever Dream, An Entrancing Tale of Forewarning: a book review
I rarely wander around the library pulling books off the shelf purely based on cover or title - I usually come equipped with a list scribbled onto the back of a ripped-open envelope. But when I eyed the thin spine of Fever Dream by Samanta Schweblin, I was intrigued and slipped it into my check-out tote. And I’m so glad I did. I love a really good one or two-sitting book - it feels like eating a perfectly-constructed sandwich, or sharing an afternoon with someone you like to kiss. This is that kind of succinct read.
The novel is appropriately named but not in a Finnegan’s Wake or As I Lay Dying kind of way - it follows a plot line that’s traceable and absorbing. The story blurrily tracks the narrative of a woman fading into her final hours, dying of environmental poisoning in the modern-day Argentine countryside. She chronicles the days’ previous events to a young boy who is not her son, and whose existence is questionable. Together, they look for the ‘important thing’ in the series of occurrences that led to her imminent death, her tragedy being one of many caused by the poisoned waters of this idyllic rural town. In a way, the poignancy is stressed by the fact that she is just vacationing here, an outsider to this paradise turned hellhole.
Schweblin writes with the sort of minimal elegance and old mysticism that keeps you tied to the page. She warns of ecological destruction and its human implications without containing a hint of nature-worship or sermonizing. By focusing on the personal and relational, the author punctuates the all-encompassing nature of environmental carelessness. With details like gold bikinis and stables without horses, glamorous women learning to drive and smoking cigarettes in parked cars, the reader is drawn into an intimate and terrifying world where the most mundane course of action could send any character to death, and it does. The fragility of life - within and without - is a constant thread throughout the novel.
The constant pull for the main character to keep her young daughter safe builds the nucleus of the story. Though she is incessantly measuring ‘the safety distance’ between them, she ultimately cannot protect her. This is first a book about devotion and what you would do to save the one you love most, and second a book about global environmental destruction - the latter made so much more poignant by the former. A dark, ancient magic weaves its way through the story, in a variation on a classic tale - the unholy negotiations a person will make to save their child, the price always too high. These trimmings of spirituality pulled deep from the humus of cultural history bring a hypnotizing element to the read - I find the juxtaposition of old magic (in a non-fantasy kind of way) in a current setting to be particularly savory, tending to lend a sharp brand of truth to story-telling.
The masterful style of Fever Dream keeps the narrative eerily light and digestible - creating a tragedy you could pack for vacation and enjoy like a treat regardless of thematic heaviness. (Though I love a dark tale, so maybe take that with a grain of salt. :)) I highly recommend this one, especially if you are a lover of the tiny book. It’s beautifully written, skillfully translated from the original Spanish, and full of truths both grave and universal.
by Brooke Hamilton