Spectator Review

Irish Times Review

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Translator’s Comments

In an interview with Heather Cleary for Literary Hub, Scweblin comments that the opening story “Headlights” is “a story that contains all the different genres, all the different atmospheres in the collection.” That story was not the opening story in the original Spanish edition, but it was moved at the suggestion of the English editor and renamed by her translator. Scweblin comments that she had written the story titled “Desperate Women” when she was a young writer, and she admits to its being more prescient than she had realized. In many ways its recognition and its placement is evidence of the positive dialogical nuance of the translation process.

While it would be fun to pull out the threads of this story that make up the tapestry of the collection, to explore the genres and the varied atmospheres, that task could not be completed as we might like. Instead, we might find ourselves confronted time after time with snarled thread, knots that resist our prying fingers. Perhaps, that’s what compels our attention. Just when we think we see the clarity of image, the inscrutability of a life turn defies what we thought we saw.

Images of growth are inevitably countered with dread rather than hope. For example, in “Rage of Pestilence” when Gismondi enters what appears to be an abandoned house, he encounters death in life. The somnolent residents are beyond response, and can only respond with anger toward the intrusion of someone who might redeem them. When a child reaches out for the sugar he offers, the specters who have emerged from everywhere freeze. The “memory of hunger” is awakened but more feared than embraced.

In “Butterflies,” the memory of the insect Calderon has inadvertently mangled functions as an objective correlative to the paralyzing fear that surrounds his delight in his daughter’s vibrancy. Children with their natural innocence and embodiment of the life force remain inscrutable to the adults who parent them.

When the father in “Mouthful of Birds” cannot redeem his daughter, cannot find a way to lure her to eat what he believes to be normal food, he finally succumbs to what he cannot understand and buys her a small bird. He retreats in horror as he hears the shriek through the closed door as his daughter consumes the live bird.  The tension between life and death exists in reality and horror.

Stephen King’s 1984 novel, Children of the Corn, burned the stark sense of horror into the minds of American readers with its graphic image of field and children whose innocence was forever lost. Samantha Schweblin’s opening story, “Headlights,” brings that field trope into the discussion of gender conflict. Her story marries King’s instinct for horror with Flannery O’Connor’s theological humor in “The Life You Save May Be Your Own.” But Schweblin probes a level of psychological complication that surpasses the grasp of either King or O’Connor. She moves relentlessly through the unique horror of the abandoned bride to the siren chorus of sisters singing in the field of renunciation. The darkly comic reversal magnifies the gender breach at the base of the story. The commandeering of the clown car passes on O’Connor’s sense of automotive power and identity. Tom T. Shiftlet can only wait for the light of redemption.

Reviews

• Chicago Review of Books
• Guardian
• Star Tribune
• Irish Times
• Slant
• New York Times

Interviews

• Lithub
• The Short Form
• Conversation — Luiselli and Schweblin
• Rain Taxi Review

Focus on Translation

• Paris Review
• Literary Hub
• BBC
• McDowell’s Website

Author (Original Language –Country/territory), translator, title (publisher/imprint)