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Book Reviewed by:A haunting, unforgettable collection of tales by Samanta Schweblin, winner of the 2022 National Book Award for Translated Literature and three-time Booker Prize finalist.
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 riven by uncertainty.
Schweblin's prose uses tension and truth to construct a literary universe in which the monsters of everyday life come so close to us that we can almost feel their breath. Her writing provokes awe and disquiet, a state of alarm that at the same time transports us to a hypnotic world as recognizable as it is strange.
The important thing to understand about these three stories (and the three others that make up this book) is that none of them is called "Good and Evil." This is a sly tweak of a typical naming convention for a short story collection: instead of one story lending the book its name, the title (and all six stories) makes it clear that "good" and "evil" are just tidy ways we can rationalize our ugliest, least explicable emotions. Like fellow Argentinian Mariana Enriquez (another author translated by Megan McDowell), Schweblin writes with eerie precision, never hiding behind cheap surrealism. You know what you are looking at, even if it's something you'd rather not behold, and that clarity makes the stranger bits (like a child's possible transformation into a horse, or a boy musing philosophically on his own tracheotomy) so much more disquieting...continued
Full Review
(627 words)
(Reviewed by Joe Hoeffner).
Karen Russell, author of The Antidote and Swamplandia!
Time and again in her masterful new collection, Schweblin creates characters whose lifelines reach some of the most extraordinary questions ever articulated in our literature. Lorrie Moore, author of I Am Homeless if This Is Not My Home
No one writes like Samanta Schweblin. Her narratives are sui generis—wonderfully unpredictable and invitingly strange.
In "An Eye in the Throat," the centerpiece of Samanta Schweblin's Good and Evil and Other Stories, a young boy named Elias puts a battery in his mouth. This being in the days before a bittering agent was added to batteries to discourage such behavior, he swallows it and causes terrible damage to his body: "The body's internal moisture has activated the battery's current, which has perforated the esophagus with a deep, dark burn." All that can be done is to perform a tracheotomy, a medical procedure which will allow Elias to breathe (if not speak) through his tracheostomy (the hole created by the procedure, also called a stoma). Lines are drawn between the literal wound in his throat and the psychic wound the incident has caused his parents:...
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Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.
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