...[a] dark, quick, strangely joyful new novel ... I cannot describe the thrill that ran through me when I realized what the premise of this book was. Of course the idea is timely ... But what amazes me is how studiously Schweblin shuns this low-hanging fruit, pushing the book’s thematic content into the background and spotlighting instead the intensity and specificity of her characters’ inner lives. I cannot remember a book so efficient in establishing character and propelling narrative; there’s material for a hundred novels in these deft, rich 242 pages ... Each story unveils a new implication of the technology, new ways for human beings to love and hurt themselves and others ... The writing, ably translated from the Spanish by Megan McDowell, is superb...the sentences snap like a flag in a gale, especially when deployed to evoke small, vivid details ... a slim volume as expansive and ambitious as an epic.
... ingenious ... as [Schweblin] works through the implications of her premise in a nimble, fast-moving narrative, what’s most impressive is the way she foregrounds her characters’ inner hopes and fears ... has much to say about connection and empathy in a globalised world. On a personal level, its investigation into solitude and online experience becomes only more poignant in a global lockdown.
Samanta Schweblin is not a science fiction writer. Which is probably one of the reasons why Little Eyes...reads like such great science fiction ... [Schweblin] basically gives everyone in the world a Furby with a webcam, and then sits back, smiling, and watches humanity shake itself to pieces ... There's a finality to the relationship. A heavy reality, bounded by life and death at either end and the juicy, exciting, terrifying, horrible middle bit where two human beings connect via the lens of a felt-covered plastic mole with camera eyes ... If the idea of a human pet, of a Furby with a person inside, was a loose thread idly toyed with on page 1, then Schweblin spends the next 249 slowly pulling at it — expertly unraveling the humans on either end of the kentuki's virtual connection. You know from the start — from the very first all-too-plausible vignette set in a teenage girl's bedroom in Indiana — that everything will end in fire and blood and tears. You just know ... But still, you can't stop watching. Even when you want to — even when Schweblin shatters your trust and twists the knife as Little Eyes reaches its absolutely gutting, absolutely haunting conclusions — you just can't look away.
... a seamless translation by Megan McDowell ... Schweblin enjoys hovering just above the normal. Inspired by Samuel Beckett, she is interested in exposing absurdities ... Little Eyes presents a plausible picture of unintended consequences from the surveillance by smart technology in our homes and our pockets.
... her interest lies in our psychological interactions with technology, making the persuasive case, at least from the perspective of the dweller, that for all the benefits a device like the kentucki might provide, it can’t resolve a person’s deep-seated issues, their flaws, insecurities, and anxieties ... On the flip side, when the narrative switches to the keepers (Enzo and Alina), the argument is less compelling. Schweblin never fully articulates why anyone would rush out to buy a kentucki ... The upshot is that I found it difficult to imagine the kentucki as anything more than a thought experiment. Having said that, Little Eyes remains a fascinating attempt at testing the boundaries of our digital existence, foregrounding the psychological, emotional implications of technology above the concerns around privacy and security.
Drawn in quotidian elegance, the novel is a string of nonstop, colorful vignettes ... If Schweblin’s sci-fi thriller Fever Dream made sleep difficult, Little Eyes raises the unease quotient. The book seems to watch viewers creepily as it unfolds.
Schweblin uses the conflict between the cutesy covering of the kentuki and the nasty actions of which they are capable as an allegory for real-world technologies, speaking to the way such invasions of privacy are packaged as benevolent additions to our lives ... There’s a subtle absurdity to the various narratives, an ironic playfulness that allows Schweblin to craft predictably calamitous scenarios with a humorous air. But for all of its invention, the concept of Little Eyes feels strangely ordinary. The kentuki is less a near-future advancement than a nostalgically primitive throwback ... Schweblin’s narrative is not so much an exaggerated dystopia a la Black Mirror, but rather a refocusing of the present. The one-on-one relationship between keeper and dweller distills our eroded privacy into something easier to understand. The omnipresent eye of data harvesting whittled down to the perverse (and almost retro) immediacy of voyeurism.
...prescient ... All of these stories contain multitudes, making the collection reminiscent of the superb novel-in-stories Here in Berlin, by Cristina García ... the monstrosity Schweblin keeps returning to, and one that is especially relevant since the onset of the covid-19 epidemic, concerns our isolation in the midst of connection ... Little Eyes may function as a sci-fi story, but its central concern is the purpose of humanity. Do we live, in the words of E.M. Forster, to 'only connect?'
Already a master at a creating that slow-closing-in horror with her debut novel, Fever Dream, Schweblin’s new novel, Little Eyes, turns her unnerving style a notch tighter ... Schweblin unveils the hidden horror of our own imaginations and our private spaces deftly and chillingly. I can’t help but think of all the many horrifying stories of racist hacker attacks who bomb Zoom conference calls at a time when that is how many of us can attend classes, social events, and work meetings. The technology, which seemed such a savior not two months ago, now lays splayed like an open wound on the web ... a brilliant, anxiety-provoking novel in a time where our anxiety, personally and societally, is at an all-time high. It is perhaps the novel we both need and deserve, and though it may take courage to pick it up, it is important we do so.
At its most effective, the work of Argentinian writer Samanta Schweblin conjures the paranoid sensation of realizing, perhaps belatedly, that one is being watched by many unseen, hostile eyes. A visceral and whimsical eeriness, part Shirley Jackson and part Purity Ring lyrics, hovers over her surreal stories of swindled people slowly wising up ... A perfect fit for this moment of zoombombing, Little Eyes nevertheless avoids being a ripped-from-the-headlines sellout and instead offers an intelligent tale about the lives that new technologies mediate ... The surprisingly heartfelt relationships the keepers and dwellers form throughout the novel are its primary delight, made all the more enjoyable by the deadpan tone with which Schweblin writes them and her avoidance of upfront exposition of the kentukis’ technology. With each vignette, we learn more about it, its risks, and the cultural conversations it’s causing. It’s a clever structure that generates the tension that makes this book, like Schweblin’s other work, so binge-worthy: one must keep reading to figure out what, exactly, a kentuki can do, as much as one reads to find out what the dwellers and keepers will do with them ... However, the structure of the book also seems to me to be too leisurely for the twists in the plot to feel earned. The final devastations feel rushed, almost as if they were added late to give the book the bite that makes Schweblin’s previous work, especially her short stories, feel so fully realized. I confess I finished the book unsatisfied, having expected a heavier dose of Schweblin’s surrealist body horror and folkloric dread. Yet, something about my reaction to that lack feels entirely appropriate ... This book is a new phase of Schweblin’s writing, a self-conscious shift in her methods for exploring the small-scale systems of domination that occupy her extant work. However, In Little Eyes, she deemphasizes the surrealism that colored her previous writing so distinctly: gone are the grotesque bodies, the sinister borderlands, and the coy, capricious presence of magic. Instead, Little Eyes is dominated by a deadpan realism flavored with her signature eeriness. On balance, it is less a drastic break from her style than an experiment within it. Schweblin’s willingness to play and push is apparent here, indicative of her imagination and exciting unpredictability. She proves that she has much more to show than the sinister surrealism she is known for
The element of farce in these proceedings makes for enjoyable reading. As a mildly absurdist situational comedy riffing on everyday human foibles—jealousy, capriciousness, existential restlessness—Little Eyes is competently crafted; the understatedly arch tone is well served by Megan McDowell’s translation, which is so slick that one hardly seems to be reading a translated work. However, to the extent that the novel aspires to be a Black Mirror-esque satire, skewering our ambivalence towards technology by presenting us with a troubling near-dystopian scenario, it doesn’t quite convince ... the facilitation of human-to-human contact is arguably one of the least interesting things about where digital technology is heading. The texture of experience conveyed in Little Eyes feels not so much speculative as nostalgic, harking back to the early days of the internet—evoking, in particular, the uncannily intimate voyeurism enabled by such websites as Chatroulette. What seemed at the time like a vision of the future is now just another cultural curio.
So, yes — if you want a spookily prescient vision of human isolation both assuaged and deepened by inscrutable, glitch-prone tech, then Little Eyes more than fits the brief. Its fairly rudimentary kit — smartly, Schweblin makes the spy-toys’ low-spec clunkiness a key element — allows claustrophobic intimacy to flourish alongside physical distancing ... Adroitly served by Megan McDowell’s winningly deadpan translation, these stories deal not in ‘truly brutal plots’ but ‘desperately human and quotidian’ urges, fears and scams. Schweblin shuns splashy dystopian gestures — think what a Stephen King or a Ray Bradbury might have done with this premise. In the middle of our stay-at-home, broadband-enabled apocalypse, that feels right.
... the world is deftly established ... The overall effect is the creation of a chilling, thrilling chorus of what the world might look like if the eyes watching us today were not big corporations looking to mine our data, but simply other curious humans, like us ... Schweblin’s cool, clinical prose refuses doing the work of interpretation for us, leaving the reader to draw their own learnings from the stage she’s set. Yet, at turns, our connections to the individual stories are severed, reminding us that we are ultimately guests in a narrative world of Schweblin’s making; engaging, but not wielding any real power in the way the world works.
... outstanding ... what I would call an instant classic ... a wonderful translation by Megan McDowell ... a book that cuts across genres and leaves them in shambles, while utilizing a unique storytelling structure to keep the pages turning ... the most remarkable thing about the book for me --- beyond Schweblin’s prescient extrapolation of where we are headed as a gadget-controlled society --- is how she infuses the kentuki with enough personality that it is difficult for the reader not to want one, notwithstanding the implicit warning label that is imprinted in each of the vignettes from which the novel is constructed. For that reason, as well as the others that I have noted, Little Eyes may well be the book that everyone is reading and talking about as we enter an uncertain summer.
The novel lays out a convincing case for why one would want to inhabit a kentuki ... It’s not clear why the keepers like their kentukis ... Unless you are an exhibitionist who is more than completely laissez-faire about giving a complete stranger visual and aural access to your home, Schweblin doesn’t give any reason for you wanting to own a kentuki at all ... Schweblin’s series of vignettes...is fascinating as a character study, and the novel’s subplots can be deliciously weird and thought-provoking. But Schweblin openly ponders the meaning of her own book too often for readers to ignore the holes, and as the book fizzles to an ending, its related subplots still unconnected, we’re left unsatisfied.
It’s a clever structure, allowing Schweblin to investigate all the things that a kentuki might be—is it a pet? a spy? a co-parent, a money-spinner, an alter ego?—as well the various thrills and dangers that such a technology might offer ... Schweblin’s language is plain, verging on the colloquial, allowing the narrator to stay close to the perspectives of the keepers and dwellers. Generally, the chapters focusing on the latter are more successful, conveying the weirdness and poignancy of existing in two bodies at once ... Schweblin’s skipping around between characters and places means that her portrayal of technology’s capabilities is broad rather than deep. While this lack of depth may not be to every reader’s taste, the novel’s breadth provides much of its pleasure, allowing an inventiveness that balances the bleakness of its characters’ lives.
The concept is strong ... But there is a fundamental weakness in Little Eyes. The obvious dramatic potential for each story of two people locked together, committed to one another until electronic death, is never fully realised ... The cycling nature of the narratives, cutting from one user to another, means we never get much momentum going, and despite the introduction of a few eye-catchingly horrible elements – a battery chick barn, a swastika shaved into a Kentuki’s head – the stories never really get the blood pounding. In fact the most shocking thing about Little Eyes, coming from Schweblin, is that it is not really shocking at all, but instead rather sensitive and tender. Well, almost.
The subject is hardly original: Schweblin’s achievement lies in eschewing the sci-fi dystopias, sentimentalism and formulaic rigidity that burden many novels of this nature. Deftly translated by Megan McDowell, Little Eyes succeeds through its depiction of a world that is profoundly human, not to say quotidian. In line with the very best Latin American writing of the fantástico, the author of Fever Dream (2014) remains faithful to the idea that the true location of the uncanny is at the heart of our reality ... In a globalized world where technology claims to have erased frontiers and within which the transnational market heralds empty promises of economic equality, Little Eyes provides us with a powerful examination of the underlining disparities that persist.
Schweblin expertly presents this unregulated world to us in intertwining stories of palpable suspense. Schweblin achieves a Black Mirror-esque effect in the novel by intertwining several storylines of varying duration ... [an] alarming, electrifying plot. One of the novel’s strongest techniques in building this sense of alarm is its choice to intersperse small chunks of many separate narratives, with kentukis as the only connecting thread ... She gives us, the readers, a cautionary tale about the repercussions inevitably suffered by playing fast and loose with the entanglements of human and robot. We witness the humans in each storyline lose confidence and control in their attempts to dominate the technology they have chosen to participate in, with fable-like moral consequences. The singularity of Schweblin’s moral consequences, however, is that unlike in a human fable, where only the human perpetrator suffers and repents, the cyborg fable compounds the suffering in unforeseeable ways ... a dystopic take on the direction our technology is headed. It brushes the abyss of the surreal, but avoids plunging into it with a plot that could reasonably take place today.
Little Eyes operates on the tension created by dread, situating Schweblin within a canon of writers (Shirley Jackson, Ray Bradbury, Octavia Butler, Toni Morrison) whose rendering of horror ultimately exposes the gorgeous, rotten and wounded parts of ourselves ... a lucid reality drawn with clinical precision that unburdens the reader from grappling with the absurdity of furry robots on wheels but also creates the illusion of solid ground. At no point does Schweblin subject her world to internal interpretation; she leaves this job to the reader, trusting us to extract our own conclusions and project our own anxieties onto her surreality.
Little Eyes echoes the urgent, clarified style of Schweblin’s earlier works, helped by the return of Megan McDowell as translator ... Concision is Schweblin’s strength, and what she sacrifices in depth is more than made up for by the ecumenical scope of the book ... a coherent theme of dread emerges, in which we, as mere viewers, are powerless to intervene ... the deeper narrative woven by these superficial episodes is bleak and merciless. Little Eyes is, at heart, a cautionary tale.
The element of farce in these proceedings makes for enjoyable reading. As a mildly absurdist situational comedy riffing on everyday human foibles—jealousy, capriciousness, existential restlessness—Little Eyes is competently crafted; the understatedly arch tone is well served by Megan McDowell’s translation, which is so slick that one hardly seems to be reading a translated work. However, to the extent that the novel aspires to be a Black Mirror-esque satire, skewering our ambivalence towards technology by presenting us with a troubling near-dystopian scenario, it doesn’t quite convince ... there is something implausible about the idea that someone in possession of such a toy would, despite knowing full well that it was remotely operated by another human, suspend their disbelief and conceive of it as a distinct being with its own personhood ... The texture of experience conveyed in Little Eyes feels not so much speculative as nostalgic, harking back to the early days of the internet—evoking, in particular, the uncannily intimate voyeurism enabled by such websites as Chatroulette. What seemed at the time like a vision of the future is now just another cultural curio.
Little Eyes is an often horrific vision of how the urge to connect online will play out ... the tone is largely grim. Schweblin has interesting ideas about the ways in which we have let our guard down with technology in order to feel connected. But these ideas never quite cohere into a satisfying narrative. Little Eyes operates as a kind of collection of loosely linked vignettes as people around the world invite these movable toys into their homes, only to realise that they can be anything but harmless fun ... there is still plenty to admire here in the way that her writing, assuredly translated by Megan McDowell, picks away at the parts of human experience that we would rather not recognise ... You do not have to be a soothsayer to work all that out, which is perhaps another problem: this novel will not really tell you anything about our tech-obsessed world that you don’t already know.
Little Eyes is an often horrific vision of how the urge to connect online will play out ... the tone is largely grim. Schweblin has interesting ideas about the ways in which we have let our guard down with technology in order to feel connected. But these ideas never quite cohere into a satisfying narrative. Little Eyes operates as a kind of collection of loosely linked vignettes as people around the world invite these movable toys into their homes, only to realise that they can be anything but harmless fun ... there is still plenty to admire here in the way that her writing, assuredly translated by Megan McDowell, picks away at the parts of human experience that we would rather not recognise ... You do not have to be a soothsayer to work all that out, which is perhaps another problem: this novel will not really tell you anything about our tech-obsessed world that you don’t already know. ... Schweblin’s clinical manner of telling, her just-revealed dexterity at sustaining the tension of a story for a longer narrative period, and her extraordinary cuentista talent for turning a world upside down in one sentence, make of Little Eyes an intriguing trip with an explosive end. Thanks to its hybrid form, the novel is a lesson in narrative contention, as it accumulates energy for its eye-popping conclusion ... The perfect execution and charged premise embedded in the narrative system of Little Eyes gives Schweblin double powers as a fabulist and as a social critic in a time governed by anxiety ... a social analysis played in fictional key, exposing how we act when we are savagely free to do what we please, as well as the fragility of our convictions and the ways new forms of mediation reveal that, contrary to our self-perception, we were mercenaries and pirates all along, who can, in luminous moments, act like saints. The conclusion of Schweblin’s investigation, as Carlos Monsiváis used to say with unrivaled precision, will not document the reader’s optimism.
... the Argentinian author eschews full-bore horror for an unsettling, Shirley Jackson-esque phantasmagoria. Little Eyes readers might experience the feeling that, Wait, isn’t this already happening? ... As an allegory of digital connectivity, Schweblin succeeds and fails. Kentukis are a creepy, believable plot device, the users and dwellers are as real as you and me, but the dissociated world they inhabit never quite gels—dwelling and using perhaps feels a bit too familiar. Which is no doubt Schweblin’s message, a message that especially bears reiterating today: How do we measure the era of social distancing, when we’ve been social distancing all along?
As situations escalate, readers will be fascinated by the kentuki-human interactions, which smartly reveal how hungry we are for connection in a technology-bent world ... this jittery eye-opener will appeal to a wide range of readers.
The internationally acclaimed author...posits the launch of a new fad in this daring and original speculative novel ... Schweblin deftly explores both the loneliness and casual cruelty that can inform our attempts to connect in this modern world.
A nuanced exploration of anonymous connection and distant intimacy in our heavily accessible yet increasingly isolated lives ... Schweblin [is] a canny observer of both the better and less-savory angels of our nature ... Capacious, touching, and disquieting, this is not-so-speculative fiction for an overnetworked and underconnected age.
Schweblin...unfurls an eerie, uncanny story of Furby-like robots that roll around and make animal sounds, connecting people throughout the world in unsettling ways ... Schweblin catapults through a dizzying array of vignettes ... Daring, bold, and devious, the idea fascinates despite the underdeveloped narrative, and the disparate vignettes fail to build toward a satisfying conclusion. Schweblin’s take on the erosion of privacy and new forms of digital connection yields an ingenious concept, but the sum is less than its parts.
