The characters of Good and Evil find themselves at a point of no return, dazzled by the glare of impending tragedy. Vulnerable and profoundly human, they become trapped in the instant in which the uncanny has lurched into their lives. Some are transformed, some are isolated, others waver between guilt or tenderness. All of them are driven by uncertainty.
Beautifully translated by Megan McDowell, in prose that shimmers with a sort of menacing lyricism, the stories of Good and Evil are powerfully evocative and unsettling. They seem to hover, indeed like fever dreams, between the reassuring familiarities of domestic life and the stark, unpredictable, visionary flights of the unconscious.
Masterly ... Quiet, devastating lucidity is a hallmark of Schweblin’s prose, captured with magnificent precision in a long-standing collaboration with translator Megan McDowell ... We have the impression of a writer absolutely and entirely in control, as Schweblin’s meticulous clarity is never compromised by the horror of her subjects. But if we trust her to take us to the bottom, almost always she will reward us with a glimmer.
Schweblin’s prose, translated with exquisite precision by her regular translator Megan McDowell, avoids all the stylistic traps of the generically mystical. There is no gauziness, no obfuscatory veil. Schweblin’s aim is neither to mystify nor to distort. Instead, she looks at the world directly, piercing its deceptive surface ... Such directness and clarity of language opens a unique emotional terrain where fear and compassion conjoin. For Schweblin, the state of porousness and fragility that arouses terror is also precisely the state through which we access that which fear holds out of reach.
