Fever Dream

Although I proceed at almost the pace of Paul Salopek’s Out of Eden Walk, I’m reading my way around the world. After reading Jamaica Kincaid’s Annie John for Antigua and Barbuda at the end of 2021, the next nation on the list was Argentina. I ended up reading Samanta Schweblin’s Fever Dream. Months have passed since I read it, but it’s still just as sharp in mind as when I put it down. Which is to say, it’s pretty fuzzy.  early in 2022, but I’m only now getting around to writing about it.

Argentina

My mental associations with Argentina are eclectic and petty. One of Seattle’s venerable classy restaurants is El Gaucho, an Argentinian steakhouse. As a vegetarian, I’ve never eaten there but its popularity accounts for my knowledge of the existence of South American cowboys called gauchos. Years ago, a coworker spent his vacation in Argentina, and related that it was like Europe in South America. A Jewish deli in my neighborhood has a mural about Jewish gauchos. And I think that’s about it. If this reading around the world challenge has taught me anything, it’s that my world-citizen self-image is much inflated; I’m barely more knowledgeable about basic geography than the woeful average American.  

Choosing the Book

My rule is that the book has to be set in the country in question and written by an author from that country. Ideally, the book will be a novel, and the author will be a woman who still lives there. If the country has been colonized, I prefer an author descended from the indigenous rather than the colonizing people. Of the six books (including this one) I’ve read for the challenge, none have met all of these criteria, and for some countries I’ve struggled to find any books that meet even most of them.

The Reader’s Room hasn’t visited Argentina yet, and Read the World only suggested two nonfiction books. But a quick Google search revealed Fever Dream, which was shortlisted for the Man Booker International Prize in 2017. My inner obsessive compulsive really wants to read through major book awards, so that clinched the selection.

Although she now lives in Germany and has a German-sounding surname, Schweblin is from Argentina and writes fiction in Spanish.

Fever Dream

The novel has elements of psychological fiction and takes inspiration from the environmental problems in Argentina.

Wikipedia

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That’s accurate in so far as it goes. And while it doesn’t go very far, it also almost goes too far – even that terse summary is kind of a spoiler.

The plot, such as it is, follows a helicopter mother on holiday in the countryside. The mother is narrating the story after the unnamed terrible thing happens, creating a constant sense of unease familiar to viewers of horror films. But the woman’s story doesn’t make sense. It skips around, usually over the important parts, and for the longest time I wasn’t sure if something awful really happened or if the woman is crazy. The English title, Fever Dream, describes the plot in the sense that we eventually realize the woman is delirious and dying as she narrates. But it also describes the book itself – nonlinear, indistinct, and confusing. But, also like a fever dream, it was powerful, and sticks with you long after you wake up.

Conclusion

I said that even telling you it’s an environmental book is kind of a spoiler. But you almost might need that much guidance, because the book is so disorienting. If the book was longer, its feverishness would be insufferable, but Schweblin knows where to quit, so it actually leaves you wanting more. I craved a rational, specific explanation but was only left with impressionistic pain, a sense of things gone horribly wrong, and a vague notion that it’s all our fault. Which of course, is a completely accurate understanding of the environmental crisis. Science can search for answers, but art has done its job.

In the sense that this challenge is “visiting” each country, Fever Dream didn’t really deliver. Although the book is set in Argentina, it could really be anywhere in the world. There are a few localizing clues like a neighboring horse farm and some superstitious healing rituals. But a well-to-do city family summering in the countryside might encounter these things just as easily in Africa or North America or even parts of Europe.

But when it comes to introducing me to literature I might have otherwise missed, this was a big win. This book was literary without being pretentious, intellectually challenging yet emotionally impactful, and had a surreal atmosphere that always appeals to me even as it makes me uncomfortable. It reminded me that South America didn’t stop producing literature with Borges and Marquez. It made me curious about the other contemporary writers I ought to read, and strengthened my commitment to studying Spanish, because I would love to be able to read all of them instead of the three percent who make it into translation.

Details

Fever Dream (Distancia de rescate) 2014  
Samanta Schweblin
Translated from Spanish by Megan McDowell 2017
‎Riverhead Books
183 pages