A book a day: Samanta Schweblin: the good evil

Year of publication: 2025

Valoración: recommended (but I expected more)

Well, as the valuation says up there, I would not say that it is a bad book but, being a book by Samanta Schweblin, I expected more … of the six stories that make up the book, one has seemed great to me; Two, good, and the other three, neither fu nor fa. There will be those who say that a great story justifies a book, and perhaps it is true, but personally I expected a somewhat greater regularity, and that more stories surprised me, impact me, made me fly.

I begin with the story that seems great to me: “The eye in my throat”, the story of a child who suffers a terrible accident that conditions his relationship with the world and his (in) ability to communicate with those around him. Something that makes the story even more shocking is the point of view, which is that of the protagonist’s own child, which reflects fears, concerns, fears, adult errors (even those who have not directly witnessed, but, despite this apparent unprocession, it is a voice that works). One of these particular errors will mark the fate of the family, as a traumatic wound that never just closed. It is an distressing story, for the story that tells, but also because of the atmostfera that builds, through a set of disturbing characters and situations (I really like English ominous To refer to this type of sensation) that, despite this essentially realistic being, in the sense of not including any fantastic or supernatural element, this is also a story of horror.

The same can be said of the first, “Welcome to the community”, which starts with the scene of a woman who tries to suicide drowning, and who continues with life after almost-death, but now dyed of a kind of curse, of disconnection with reality and with the world that only pain can alleviate. A neighbor, another “ominous” figure, serves as his guide In this new condition that in psychoanalytic terms we could call “abject”. The third and last story that I liked, although somewhat less, is “the superior makes a visit”, a story of brutal and slightly absurd violence that suggests some films by the Coen or Tarantino brothers.

The remaining three stories, I have already said, have left me quite cold, no matter how well written they are. “A fabulous animal” and “The woman of Antarctica” share the painful return, and at the same time magical, of certain terrible memories of childhood; In the second also the subject also returns, already explored by the author in previous stories, of the invasion of foreign houses, with better or worst intentions (theme that, by the way, also resonates in some way in “the superior makes a visit”). Finally, “William in the window” is, as the author herself confesses in a final grade, an autobiographical story, and although it contains the insinuation of a ghost story, it ends up integrating the long tradition of stories about writers who write about other writers, and that personally finds it quite burdensome …

Naturally, I do not regret having read the book, even if only for having enjoyed “the eye in my throat.” And although this work has not finished filling, I don’t think that’s why I stop buying the next. I have only missed, in the middle of his stories, that dark and extraordinary vibration that makes his reading deep and unforgettable.