While “distancia de rescate” (“rescue distance”) is a concept woven throughout the text, McDowell reconfigured the title to Fever Dream in the English. But I want to pause and touch on Megan McDowell’s clever take on the title for a second. If anything, it’s a novel that demands to be read in one sitting, as Schweblin conjures up such an unrelenting, suffocating sense of dread that you’re left with no choice but to keep reading. Originally published in Spanish as Distancia de rescate in 2014, Fever Dream was the first of acclaimed Argentine writer Samanta Schweblin’s titles to receive the English translation treatment and it’s effectively sinister I gobbled up in little over an hour. Over the next 100 or so pages, an eerily lucid David prompts the dying and disoriented Amanda to delve into her memory and recall the recent trauma that’s led her to this hospital, by way of a frenzied, sometimes repetitive dialogue in which stories are told and then retold, framed and reframed. He’s not her child.” Amanda is, in fact, mother to a daughter called Nina, while David’s mother is the gold bikini-wearing Carla.
As the blurb reads: “She’s not his mother. We open on narrator Amanda on her death bed in a hospital room, accompanied by a young boy called David. When I cracked open Fever Dream at gone midnight a few weeks ago, I had no idea this freaky little novel by Samanta Schweblin – almost a novella, really – was a tale of psychological eco-horror, one that would proved both gripping and frustratingly ambiguous in equal measure. This post contains affiliate links to independent bookstores.
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