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Fever dream : a novel
Book
2017
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Where is it?
Fiction/Biography Profile
Characters
Amanda (Female), Married, Mother, Dying in a hospital; being kept company by David, a boy she is not related to in any way
David (Boy), Sits by Amanda's hospital bed telling her stories
Genre
Fiction
Psychological
Cautionary tale
Thriller
Topics
Death and dying
Storytelling
Love
Ghosts
Poisoning
Motherhood
Mothers and daughters
Setting
Argentina - South America / Latin America
Large Cover Image
Trade Reviews
Library Journal Review
Schweblin, who is Buenos Aires-born and now lives in Berlin, makes her English--language novel debut, thanks to -McDowell's crisp translation. Worms, migrating souls, unseen toxins, and deformed children punctuate a mysterious dialog between Amanda, a dying woman in an emergency clinic, and David, a boy not her son. The print version uses italics to distinguish David's part of the conversation from Amanda's; here, veteran narrator -Hillary Huber impressively, instantly, adapts her voice as necessary. Amanda and David take turns reconstructing an elliptical recent past that begins "a few days ago" when Amanda met David's mother, Carla, at a lake house. Amanda adds another narrative layer, sharing Carla's story from six years previous when David fell devastatingly ill after drinking from a poisoned stream. Saving his body cleaves his soul, the consequences of which lead inexplicably to Amanda's daughter Nina. VERDICT Part unreliable nightmare, part dysfunctional confession, part eco-parable, -Schweblin's slim title should prove irresistible to contemporary world literature aficionados. ["Schweblin's surreal debut novel will be a breath of fresh air": LJ 1/17 starred review of the Riverhead hc.]-Terry Hong, Smithsonian BookDragon, Washington, DC © Copyright 2017. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Publishers Weekly Review
In her pulsating debut, Schweblin tells the story of Amanda, a young mother dying in a hospital, who talks to a neighborhood boy, David, as he sits by her bedside. David has Amanda recount the events leading up to her sudden illness-in search of, as he says, "the worms" that caused her ailment-and the result is a swirling narrative packed with dream logic and bizarre coincidences, where souls shift from sick bodies to healthy hosts and poisonous toxins seep under the skin upon contact with the grass. As Amanda and her daughter, Nina, try to settle in at their vacation home away from the city, they become entangled with Carla, David's mother, who appears at random intervals and spins wild tales of her son. After a frightening encounter with David, Amanda throws Carla and the boy out of her home, yet before long, the trio of women are reunited, and from her future hospital bed, a semilucid Amanda tries to remember how this meeting resulted in her death spiral. Powered by an unreliable narrator-is Amanda imagining David by her side?-Schweblin guides her reader through a nightmare scenario with amazing skill. (Jan.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Summary
"Genius." --Jia Tolentino, The New Yorker

"Samanta Schweblin's electric story reads like a Fever Dream ." --Vanity Fair

Shortlisted for the Man Booker International Prize!

Experience the blazing, surreal sensation of a fever dream...

A young woman named Amanda lies dying in a rural hospital clinic. A boy named David sits beside her. She's not his mother. He's not her child. Together, they tell a haunting story of broken souls, toxins, and the power and desperation of family.

Fever Dream is a nightmare come to life, a ghost story for the real world, a love story and a cautionary tale. One of the freshest new voices to come out of the Spanish language and translated into English for the first time, Samanta Schweblin creates an aura of strange psychological menace and otherworldly reality in this absorbing, unsettling, taut novel.
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