Reviews

Apart from Franz Kafka, no writer has so profoundly plumbed the depths of the human psyche or has brought to the surface a more nightmarish landscape of the subconscious mind.
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Really could anyone reach the heights of Kafka's vision? In this short story collection, author Samanta Schweblin comes very close.
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The opening of each of her stories recalls the same sense of disorientation and uneasiness felt at the beginning of Kafka's Metamorphosis. And like the first moments of a dream or more aptly a nightmare, Schweblin drops the reader in the middle of a story that feels like it has already begun. There is an immediate urgency to create order; asumptions are made and the rules of the story's reality are established. But Schweblin shows us that there are no rules, no answers. She subverts expectations at every turn. ⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀
The stories are a combination of surrealism and fable through which the innermost concerns of the modern adult are laid bare. There are flights of logic and reality, but there is something haunting and recognizable in each tale. Perhaps, our preoccupation with aging and mortality; the degradation of true human connections or our alienation from others; the desensitization to violence and the need to find comfort in the mundane and in commodities.
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This book has already become one of the best titles I've read this year. It is a fine collection and certainly deserving of the attention it has already received.