Samanta Schweblin has done it again. Berlin’s short-story master does not miss. Born in Buenos Aires and based here since 2012, Schweblin has steadily become a global sensation on account of her dark, intriguing fiction: a novel here, a novella there, but primarily her stories. Seven Empty Houses, which won the National Book Award for Translated Literature in 2022, was one of the finest collections this critic has ever read.
Her new offering is just as good. When it returns to earlier Schweblinian fixations, the feeling is not one of repetition but rather of a creative mind that knows exactly what gets it going. These stories are tender yet tough; they are also more or less supernatural, tugging away at the fabric of everyday life. “The threshold,” said Goethe, “is always the place to pause.” Schweblin is a genius of humanity’s threshold conditions: childhood and death, illness and madness, old age and obsession, grief and creativity. Hers is a Gothic kind of realism: her fiction is precisely as surreal as life is.
- Good and Evil and Other Stories by Samanta Schweblin (trans. Megan McDowell) is available from Knopf, details
