SAMANTA SCHWEBLIN Seven Empty Houses. Reviewed by Ann Skea
Shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize for her novel Fever Dream, Argentine writer Samantha Schweblin has a talent for unsettling stories.
These stories are weird and wonderful, and, given the strange behaviour of people that we hear about every day, completely believable.
What does a daughter feel when she has to deal with her mother’s obsession for, unbidden, tidying the expensive homes of complete strangers then running off with some favoured object?
How does a man cope when his visiting parents are joyfully running around naked in the garden and his ex-wife is terrified that her new man, or the grandchildren, might see them?
What does it feel like to be old, infirm, and wanting to die, but all you can do is make a short list to stave off the increasing memory failures and become obsessed with packing up almost everything in the house?
Schweblin creates characters who draw you into their lives so that you feel their dilemmas. If there are resolutions, they are unexpected. Her approach is subtle, too, hinting at psychological disturbances and letting the reader feel their effects, rather than spelling them out.
You know that the list-making woman wants to die and, when it seems imminent, she is dismayed when it doesn’t happen. You know she is aware when strange and worrying things seem to occur, in spite of her list. You know, too, that she relies on her equally elderly husband, although she only ever refers to him disparagingly as ‘he’ and ‘him’. He appears on her list:
Classify everything.
Donate what is expendable.
Wrap what is important.
Concentrate on death.
If he meddles, ignore him.
When he dies, she simply crosses the last item off her list.
Often, there is a feeling of threat in the stories, as in ‘An Unlucky Man’, which begins:
The day I turned eight, my sister – who absolutely always had to be the centre of attention – swallowed an entire cup of bleach. Abi was three.
The narrator describes the ensuing panic and how she ends up sitting alone in a hospital waiting room while her parents and sister are being helped.
Then a man came and sat down next to me. I don’t know where he came from; I hadn’t noticed him before.
‘How‘s it going?’ he asked
I thought about saying ‘Very well’ which is what Mom always said if someone asked her that, even if she’d just told me and Abi that we were driving her insane.
‘Okay,’ I said.
When the man offers a voucher for a free Ice-cream cone, she refuses, but eventually agrees to leave the hospital with him. The reader worries about what is happening and the tension is maintained until the end of the story. The ending is unexpected, but still troubling.
There are not seven empty houses in this book, as the title might suggest, but the minds of seven people, none of which are empty and all of which are disturbed in some way. Schweblin is adept at suggesting uncomfortable feelings about filial duty, the worrying behaviour of neighbours and the urge to help, the disorientation felt when moving to unfamiliar places, love and the lack of love, and the ways in which people distract themselves from difficult emotions.
The situations she invents are odd, and the people she puts into them are individuals, each with their own character, thoughts and behaviour. Altogether, this is an unusual, beautifully imagined and unsettling book, where each one of us might recognise the feelings of its inhabitants, although we may not act them out in quite the same way.
Samanta Schweblin Seven Empty Houses Translated from the Spanish by Megan McDowell Bloomsbury 2022 PB 208pp $34.99
Dr Ann Skea is a freelance reviewer, writer and an independent scholar of the work of Ted Hughes. She is author of Ted Hughes: The Poetic Quest (UNE 1994, and currently available for free download here). Her work is internationally published and her Ted Hughes webpages (ann.skea.com) are archived by the British Library.
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