No previous book, at least, has filled me with unease the way Fever Dream did ... Schweblin sustains both conversations while narrowing them toward a single question: the mysterious horror of the worms. Intertwined, these two dialogues form a shadow of an explanation—one that runs on nightmare logic, inexorable but elusive, and always just barely out of reach ... In Fever Dream, every body is a shell for another voice, another presence. The reader begins to feel as if she is Amanda, tethered to a conversation that thrums with malevolence but which provides the only alternative to the void. Eventually, I began to mistrust every word—not because of the potential dishonesty of the characters, and not because the artifice in Schweblin’s conceit was becoming unwieldy. Rather, I sensed that something terrible was happening just out of sight ... the genius of Fever Dream is less in what it says than in how Schweblin says it, with a design at once so enigmatic and so disciplined that the book feels as if it belongs to a new literary genre altogether.
...[a] mesmerizing debut novel ... David — Schweblin hints — might be a hallucination, a product of the fevered state that gives the novel, nimbly translated by Megan McDowell, its title. But his existence or nonexistence doesn’t really matter because the emotions he elicits are so chillingly real and familiar ... Schweblin is an artist of remarkable restraint, only dabbing on the atmospherics, while focusing her crystalline prose on the interior lives of the two mothers, Amanda and Carla, as well as the vagaries of memory ... Schweblin renders psychological trauma with such alacrity that the conceit of a poisoned environment feels almost beside the point ... After reading Fever Dream, I wanted Schweblin to let the rope out more. Not because Fever Dream isn’t an almost perfect short novel — because it most certainly is. But because I wanted to see what Schweblin could do when she went deeper into the place where she so skillfully had taken me.
...an exceptional example of the short-and-creepy form ... This is where Schweblin comes closest to Pedro Páramo. Rulfo's novel is half surreal tale of the afterlife and half political critique: Comala, where it's set, is a town of the dead because Pedro Páramo, its sole landowner, starved his tenants to death in a prolonged act of cruelty and rage. Fever Dream is an eco-critic's version of the same plot ... translated perfectly by Megan McDowell, who for my money is the best Spanish-to-English translator around. Schweblin writes with such restraint that I never questioned a sentence or a statement. This is the power of the short novel: Stripped down to its essentials, her story all but glows. Which makes sense, after all. It's toxic.
Fever Dream is worth reading for its inventiveness alone. Schweblin gives us memorable characters and a haunting parable, all in fewer than 200 short pages ... she taps into primal fears without ever naming them. The uncertainly is chilling, which is exactly the point ... Fans of Black Mirror or The Twilight Zone might be drawn to the fantastical setup of Fever Dream, but may be dissatisfied with the book’s quiet, abstract ending. Otherwise, Schweblin’s quick, feverish story is worth reading for her intoxicating style alone.
...at fewer than 30,000 words, this psychological thriller and subtly clever allegory is more of a novella that reads like a feverish dream. But it's no ordinary thriller, and Schweblin is no ordinary writer ... An absorbing and inventive tale ... Schweblin is a fine mythmaker, singular in her own fantastical artistry.
Fever Dream should position Schweblin comfortably alongside young American writers such as Amelia Gray and Jesse Ball ... the novel represents a perfect marriage of form and subject, in which its narrative instability — which is so of the literary moment — viscerally recreates the insecurities of life in the Argentine countryside today ... Schweblin, like Gray and Ball, has found ways to electrify and destabilize the physical world. In particular, she shatters the notion that there might be such a thing as a safe space ... Fever Dream, then, is a novel about childless parents and parentless children, about split identities and living on land you can’t trust — which is to say, it's a novel about Argentina’s struggles. More than that, it’s the scariest of all things: a ghost story that is, in essence, true.
To call Schweblin’s novella eerie and hallucinatory is only to gesture at its compact power; the fantastical here simply dilates a reality we begin to accept as terrifying and true ... The tale that follows is a swift descent into phantasmagoria, as the dialogue between Amanda and David — translated into lucid English by McDowell — turns into a cleareyed reminiscence of horror and a struggle for narrative control ... Damaged children, a degraded earth, souls that move between bodies but never find rest: Schweblin’s book is suffused with haunting images and big questions, and in Amanda she places a mother’s all-consuming love and fear for her child.
...[a] short, terrifying and brilliant first novel ... 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 way Fever Dream is written invests every scene with suspense 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 ... 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.
It’s rare for a book to do exactly what its title says it will do without any caveats or reservations. It’s even more rare for a book to achieve the kind of woozy, elliptical, intimate horror implied by a title like Fever Dream. But this debut novel by Argentinian short story writer Samanta Schweblin does exactly that. Fever Dream operates on the level of pure atmosphere. Its action is minimal ... The result is astonishingly and profoundly unsettling, in a way that few books ever quite achieve. Fever Dream is a novel stripped down to its barest elements, all dialogue and atmosphere, and working with only those elements, it manages to create an authentic nightmare. 'Authentic nightmare' is not the experience everyone wants to get out of a book (I confess it’s not my ideal read, personally), and if it sounds deeply unpleasant to you, then Fever Dream is not your book. But if you’re after creeping, insidious, psychologically compelling horror, then you won’t do better.
...a short novel that wraps around itself like a mobius strip ... Supernatural plot detail always treads the thin line between silliness and expressive metaphor. But here, whenever our suspension of disbelief is strained, David is on hand to force Amanda’s and our attention back on the important question: what has been done to her and where is her daughter? ... By focusing on the terrifying suspense of this last question, [Schweblin] transcends the sensational plot elements to achieve a powerful and humane vision.
Fever Dream is a short, terse novel; it’s also as expansive as the mind itself, and terrifying in the ways in which it evokes a panicked psyche spilling out its most horrific memories, fixations, and secrets ... The title of Fever Dream serves as a constant reminder of the terrain we’re in as readers. At times, the give-and-take between Amanda and David can seem stilted, like an interrogation pushed into some realm far beyond stylization; on the other hand, that seems entirely appropriate for a fever dream. So, too, is the case with the strange twists the plot takes, which can defy logic–but, perhaps, not the logic of a fever dream ... To say that this novel perfectly evokes the experience of its title, then, is meant as the highest compliment: the delirium of the unconscious, and all the terrors it can dredge up.
Though it may sound straightforward, Fever Dream’s narrative structure toys with the reader’s understanding of the events. Schweblin uses the novel’s structure to evoke the sense of being attentive to and pulled by something you are emotionally attached to ... what’s irresistible about the novel is how its structure heightens the interplay between what the David and Carla know and what Amanda, along with the reader, is desperate to figure out. Schweblin pushes the reader to piece together Fever Dream’s various meanings ... Although I don’t have answers for these questions, the novel still works for me. It explores urgency and love within the context of unknown harms. The characters will never figure out what happened, and neither will the reader. We have to accept the unknowns. Because knowing the facts isn’t the point.
