MixedThe Sydney Morning HeraldMouthful of Birds, the collection, bears the hallmarks of having been forged in a scarred, psychoanalytically informed, unforgiving Latin American sensibility, filled as it is with brutal authoritarian figures and casually committed murders, and families literally torn apart by sadistic and malign forces, or else downright banal family dynamics. What occurs in its fictions is so tough on the psyche, so hard on the emotions, I was left cowering, then running to comprehend what part of Argentina’s history and politics might be present in what Schweblin chooses to say, or play with, in these harrowing stories ... a reader must pinch herself through much of this collection, because it’s not possible to really know what Schweblin is up to.
