In other words, the phone call is coming from inside the house. Any implied creepiness is a product of the reader’s own imagination. A police officer asks, “Are you telling me that there are children and adults naked and together?” Schweblin is never explicit. In “My Parents and My Children,” a man’s family members are frolicking around nude when they go missing. In “An Unlucky Man,” an unnamed male stranger leads a little girl away from her parents in a hospital waiting room, with the promise of buying her a pair of underwear. These roles give Schweblin room to play with expectations and taboos. There are mothers and daughters, fathers and sons, wives, in-laws, sisters and husbands.
What remains are our labels, those signifiers that connect us to others and give us a sense of identity. There are absences on many levels: Characters disappear and reappear most are unnamed. Darker and more tinged with terror than her breakthrough novel, “Fever Dream,” this is Schweblin at her sharpest and most ferocious.Īrranged as peepholes into the private lives of others, each of these seven stories centers on a domestic dwelling, exploring how the things that constitute our most intimate spaces are relational and interconnected, and therefore in many ways the most unstable.
“Seven Empty Houses,” first published in Spanish in 2015 and now translated into English by Megan McDowell, takes aim at the place we feel safest: home. Rejoice! Just when we’re settling into fall, all cozy on the couch with a Netflix show queued up, a new short story collection from Samanta Schweblin is here to spit in your pumpkin spiced latte and drag its nails down the wall. SEVEN EMPTY HOUSES, by Samanta Schweblin, translated by Megan McDowell
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