It is not very often that an epigraph reflects the overall atmosphere and mood of a particular book ideally, but Samanta Schweblin's latest short story collection Good and Evil and Other Stories opening with Silvina Ocampo's words "strange is always truer" is a great example. It is an atmospheric, quite unique, strange work about seemingly everyday situations and people that are just a little bit eerie, but never openly horrifying, yet always slightly terrifying.
Starting the collection, scattered recurring motifs such as water, horses, or rabbits might erroneously lead the reader to assume that Schweblin continued where she left her 2014 novel Distancia de rescate/Fever Dream. Expressly the inaugural short story Welcome to the Club opens with a very dreamy, visceral, claustrophobic, but at the same time strangely comforting drowning scene in a lake. The attempt of a woman, a wife and mother of two children, at killing herself. Her striking attempt is followed by a stretch of time in which neither she nor the reader for sure knows whether she survived it or she died of it. Everything feels like between white clouds and cotton balls - muffled, dampened, dreamy (or nightmarish?) and unreal. Until she meets a certain person who went through the exact same thing: her neighbor. Schweblin does not spoon-feed her readers a backstory, but through certain circumstances, this neighbor is the only person who can give our main character the one single piece of useful information: in order to remain in this world, you have to cause pain for the ones you love, everyday.
To readers for whom the concept of pain is a central part of what they read, such as myself, the delight this story provides will be evident. I'd like to complement that thought with a question I have asked Samanta Schweblin at the author's night, the presentation of this collection at the Otherland Bookstore on November 8th. At her last reading I attended, I think it was last year or a couple of years ago (she lives in Berlin so it's not unusual to find her), she had made this sweet analogy that what a piece of fiction, be it a novel or a short story, has to make you feel is like a note that falls out of your wallet, reminding you of, or making you feel the exact way as in the time that note was written in. So I asked her what the note for this story is, and it was a very very personal, awful thing... I regretted a little bit asking about it because it was so intimate, but at the end I'm really impressed it turned into this story because it is a banger and a good choice to open a collection with.
...a sound that is me, but is broken.
The element of pain creeps through all of the stories in the collection and leaves its trail, be it in the long distance phone call between two old friends who together recollect a sorrow from the past, through seemingly innocent, but tense remarks in A Fabulous Animal; or in what a child left unattended for a moment does that determines his whole life, and the parents' anguish over it in An Eye in the Hole; or the healing of a past encounter through help with hair and body care, the alleviation of a painful wound in The Woman from Atlantida.
At the author's event Samanta talked about technicalities a lot, which was really interesting, especially if you plan on writing yourself. Later I was chatting with a person who was there that evening and she told me that after Samanta's talk, she started writing everyday a little bit herself. I think to be able to inspire people to do something like that is pretty much the best outcome of such an evening.
Furthermore she - again - highlighted how she knows exactly where she wants to go with her stories, that her destination, the feeling she wants to transmit is quite clear to her, even though the way that leads there is not always. A little anecdote related to this closed the evening, and will close my post too.
While writing the last story in the collection, A Visit from the Chief, and being stuck at a certain moment, unsure of how to go on with it, Schweblin enrolled in a gym class with a very despotic instructor who took a dislike to her from day one. He would borderline insult her, look down on her, make disparaging remarks about her not being athletic enough, and generally acting like a boot camp instructor. Instead of letting that pull her down, she was fascinated by this weirdly mean character and observed him while he was doing what he does. She observed the way he talked, she observed what he said and how he was acting and let him inspire the most unlikable and cruel character in this book; she made him into the Chief in the last story. When she was done with the story she quit the course and never went back again, hahaha.
So far my favorite Schweblin (I hadn't read any short stories by her before), Good and Evil and Other Stories receives my thumbs up, both for its strangely beautiful stories that leave you hanging in a state of uncertainty (but that's fine), and for its charming and skilled author.
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