A terrifying but brilliant read

“Each thing she tells you is going to be worse,” someone says about two thirds of the way through Samanta Schweblin’s short, terrifying and brilliant first novel, now longlisted for the Man Booker International prize. It could be the book’s strapline, as she remorselessly cranks up the tension until every sentence seems to tremble with threat.

Fever Dream, translated by Megan McDowell, is the Argentinian writer’s first book to appear in English (she has written three short story collections). In it, Amanda has left her husband working in Buenos Aires and travelled, with her daughter Nina, to a holiday home in the countryside. She becomes friendly with a neighbour, Carla, who tells her a horrible, apparently supernatural story about her seven- or eight-year-old son David, whose soul, Carla believes, has “transmigrated” into another body: “So this one is my new David. This monster.”

Shocked and puzzled by the story, Amanda suspects Carla is delusional.

Fever Dream is cleverly structured as a dialogue between Amanda, who cannot see and is apparently lying in a hospital bed, and the eerily precocious David, who implacably urges Amanda on towards a confrontation with the unknown but apparently terrible event that has brought her here. David’s disembodied voice is chorus, prompt and guide, increasing the dreadful menace that builds as Amanda tells her story. He is also a strict editor: “None of this is important,” he chides her at one point. “We’re wasting time.” When she asks him, “Why do we have to go so quickly, David? Is there so little time left?” he replies, “Very little”. When Amanda doubts whether any of this is happening, or really happened the way she remembers it — a seed Schweblin plants variants of throughout the book — he is quick to get her back on track: “It’s happening, Amanda. I’m kneeling at the edge of your bed, in one of the rooms at the emergency clinic. We don’t have much time, and before time runs out we have to find the exact moment.”

The inexorably growing dread about the nature of that exact moment — which involves “worms, something very much like worms, and the exact moment when they touch your body for the first time” — is one of the things that makes Fever Dream nearly impossible to put down. Early in the book, Amanda talks about “the rescue distance”, the variable safe distance between Amanda and Nina at any one time (the phrase is the original, and better, title of the book in Spanish). As the perceived level of threat increases, the more taut the line grows and the closer together they must be. When David asks Amanda why mothers are constantly trying to “get out in front of anything that could happen”, Amanda’s answer encapsulates the hereditary fear the book originates from and feeds on: “It’s because sooner or later something terrible will happen. My grandmother used to tell my mother that, all through her childhood, and my mother would tell me, throughout mine. And now I have to take care of Nina.”

Over the course of the novel the landscape becomes almost as prominent a character as Amanda and David. The rural Argentina that Schweblin portrays is an eerie place: “the soy fields, the streams that crisscross the dry plots of land, the miles of open fields empty of livestock”.

In Jorge Luis Borges’s story “The South”, which is also about a feverish hospital patient and a threat-filled journey into rural Argentina, the character Johannes Dahlmann thinks of the land beyond Buenos Aires as “an older and more stable world”, but in fact it proves dangerous, unknowable and ultimately fatal. The bleak region Schweblin takes us to imparts the same atmosphere.

The way Fever Dream is written invests every scene with suspense — will this be the moment we discover where Nina is, or what that reference to worms really means? — and makes a tantalising riddle of the book’s meaning. Its events play out somewhere between fears about GM crops (Argentina is one of the world’s leading producers) and folk superstition. One could also argue for a reading of the book in which mothers, despite their overwhelming desire to keep their children safe, become the agents of disaster. Paradoxically, this is a book only parents will feel the full impact of, but that impact is so great you don’t want to recommend it to anyone with young children.

Like another unforgettable short novel about a woman speeding towards a foreshadowed doom, Muriel Spark’s The Driver’s Seat, Schweblin’s book leaves the reader with detective work to do. But Fever Dream’s ambiguities, and the intricate psychologies with which Schweblin invests her characters, mean that rereading proves rewarding even when the suspense is removed.

Wherever you decide the truth lies, aspects of Amanda’s story will continue to puzzle and haunt you long after she stops being able to tell it.

–Guardian News & Media Ltd