Samanta Schweblin’s absolutely terrifying second novel, Distancia de Rescate, published in America as Fever Dream and nominated for the Booker Prize, was among many readers’ and critics’ favorites of 2017. Her third novel, Little Eyes, published in May of this year, is somewhat less frightening, though equally compelling, and has received much the same rapturous praise—as J. Robert Lennon writes in his glowing New York Times piece, “I cannot remember a book so efficient in establishing character and propelling narrative; there’s material for a hundred novels in these deft, rich 237 pages.”
Little Eyes centers around a pop-culture phenomenon, spawned in Japan, called the Kentuki, cute little animatronic animal creatures with cameras in their eyes. For a few hundred bucks, people buy Kentukis, or buy the right to inhabit a Kentuki. In this way, Keepers are paired with Dwellers, strangers who often live on opposite sides of the globe. With this deceptively simple, very creepy premise, Schweblin masterfully intertwines multiple characters’ lives in this slim, audacious novel that speaks with oblique force to our present moment.
Schweblin was gracious enough to answer a few questions about her writing process, via her long-time translator, Megan McDowell.
The Millions: First, I love Little Eyes. I think it succeeds at something that is very hard to do, namely, to write about our current cultural moment in a way that feels plausible, but just imaginatively different enough to provide perspective on the way we live in 2020. Kentukis are such perfect metaphor for the Internet, and the voyeuristic abuse we willingly participate in every day. I’m sure you’ve been asked this a lot, but can you talk a little about where the idea for Kentukis came from?
Samanta Schweblin: I guess it was the combination of several things. It was a moment of my life when I lived—physically—in Berlin, but really I spent the whole day—virtually—in Buenos Aires and Barcelona. I could spend maybe five or six hours a day in video meetings, and sometimes I’d go an entire week when my only interaction with other people was virtual. In times of coronavirus that seems like a fairly common thing, but three years ago it still felt like a pretty strange lifestyle. The idea of the kentukis emerged from that context, as I thought about the emergence of drones in the cities, about the legal and moral limits of new technologies, and how those technologies seem to work—maybe treacherously—as the new universal language between cultures, languages, and idiosyncrasies.
TM: It always strikes me that the main struggle in writing a novel is figuring out the structure, the specific form that provides you the best angle of approach to the material. Little Eyes takes the form of many different interwoven stories of Kentuki dwellers and keepers. Did you work through other versions of the telling to get to this structure, or did it immediately occur to you as the right way to tell this particular story?
SS: The structure was there from the first draft onward, short chapters that occur in different cities around the world. I can’t imagine this story told any other way besides chorally, as a panoptic window onto dozens of small, mundane private worlds. What did gradually change and evolve along the way was which stories really needed to be told. The kentuki device functioned so easily when it came to telling new stories that it was very tempting to fall into the trap of telling all, of delving into each opportunity and ending up trapped in a kind of exercise of cataloguing possibilities. So at some point in the process there was a big selection and discarding of stories in favor of the large main arc that goes through the whole book, which is the introduction and spread of the kentuki through society, and where it drives its users.
TM: Is there one of the stories that you consider the “central” story of Little Eyes? The novel ends with Alina, so in a way the book presents her narrative as perhaps the most significant. But in the writing of the book, was there a story that felt like the central story that the other stories were constructed around?
SS: Yes, Alina’s story could be considered the main one. Of all the characters, Alina is the one who most thinks about and even challenges the logistical and moral ideas of what a kentuki is. She refuses to actively participate in the master-pet dynamic, and that refusal leads her to another kind of trap. Alina is also a kind of alter-ego of mine. I lived for three months at that residency in the Oaxacan mountains, far from any city and surrounded by the genius and egocentrism of many artists, with disillusionments and existential crises that were very similar. It was an exceptional experience, and much of that adventure became material for Alina’s chapters.
TM: This novel, like Fever Dream, is very unnerving, though perhaps to a slightly lesser extent. Both books, in my reading, involve the idea of inhabitation—in Fever Dream, David, who is seemingly beside Amanda, almost in her head; in Little Eyes, the Kentukis, which both inhabit the living space of their Keepers and are inhabited by their Dwellers. What is it, do you think, that’s so frightening about this idea of inhabitation?
SS: Maybe it’s a great curiosity about the “soul” or “essence” of things, of people and words. Things, people, and words can seem to always be the same, you can touch them, even words. They’re tangible and verifiable. But their essence is a great mystery. What would happen if one day your son looked at you a second longer than usual, and something in his eyes made you certain that it wasn’t him anymore? What would you do if you were confronted with the disturbing and unprovable idea that whoever had been inside your child all that time has suddenly been replaced with someone else? What we don’t see is also what we presume, it’s the mystery where our prejudices nest, our personal ideas about everything, people, and words.
TM: A related question: over the course of a novelist’s career, you begin to see, like it or not, the emergence of persistent themes. For example, in my own work, a theme of suicide appears over and over—I’m not especially happy about this, but I write a novel and there it is. Have you been conscious of this theme of inhabitation in your work, and do you have a sense of where it comes from?
SS: Yes, it’s not easy for me to escape my subjects either. When I started to write Little Eyes, I felt like I was absolutely outside my comfort zone. I thought, with curiosity but also with fear, am I really going to write a novel about technology? Who cares about technology?—I’m not the slightest bit interested—but then, what is this book about? After the first edition was published in Spanish and I had a little more distance from the book, I saw clearly that I hadn’t escaped anything, there were my same subjects as always: lack of communication, prejudice, the violence of the unsaid, desire, voyeurism, solitude, “inhabitation,” as you well call it…Maybe it’s not so much the problem of the subjects we talk about, but rather our own fears, our pain, and the questions by which we move through those subjects. And these are not burdens that change from book to book, they are big life questions, and maybe answering them takes us more time–or more books—than we would like.
TM: Little Eyes is a dark novel, but compared to Fever Dream, the tone feels a bit lighter, even somewhat comic in places, for instance the Barcelona chapter in the old persons’ home, and the chapter with the two little girls. Both of these chapters are simultaneously terrifying, and yet very funny (to me), almost a kind of slapstick comedy. There’s a real intermittent joyfulness to the book, as well, for instance in Marvin’s quest for snow, and in the short chapter at the concert. I wonder if this tonal difference was intentional after the absolute darkness of Fever Dream, or merely a product of the material.
SS: There’s something in the material that allows for a more lightweight game, but it was also a necessity. All my books have been a little dark up to now, and I felt like I needed a little fresh air, I needed to change the tone, the rhythm, even the narrator. Also, thinking about references as I was writing Little Eyes, I felt oddly connected to Ray Bradbury, who was perhaps the first writer I read with devotion in my first adult readings. Bradbury is dark and mysterious, but also, without a doubt, he’s an optimist. There is always light and air in his stories, there’s always a moment that today we would read as almost bordering on naïveté, when Bradbury says, “I believe in humanity, this will work out.” I thought a lot about that, I reread him carefully, and I realized to what extent that kind of optimism is perhaps one of the most daring—and difficult—movements to make in horror and mystery. In fact, I don’t think Little Eyes achieves that optimism in the slightest. But maybe there’s at least the feeling of a little air, a gesture, a nod toward that brighter zone.
TM: In Little Eyes, Kentukis are described so persuasively as a cultural phenomenon, that I think a reader can’t help but imagine them in the real world, and imagine if they’d prefer to be a Dweller or Keeper. Dweller seems the obvious choice to me, if I had to choose one—I wonder which you would pick?
SS: I had the same feeling when I started to write this book. Maybe because being a Dweller allows you to look at the other, to spy on them and discover who they really are when they think no one is looking. There’s a lot of voyeurism in the Dweller, and I guess all writers have something of the voyeur about us. We want to look at others in order to understand ourselves. But the truth is that over the course of the novel I discovered that being a Keeper, “possessing” the other, was a very interesting condition to investigate through literature. What is really awakened in a person by that desire to possess, by that morbid curiosity, even a veiled form of violence? What is it about certain contemporary devices that drives us toward places we never thought we’d go, but where we suddenly recognize ourselves, caught in the trap?
TM: I like to end these interviews with a stupid question. Do you mostly write on a computer, typewriter, or by hand? If, like most people, you usually use a computer to write, have you ever attempted writing longhand and what was the result?
SS: Practically speaking, and thinking about my routines, I’d say that 90 percent of my writing is on the computer. But there are also times when I get stuck, and I’ll take my notebook and go out for a walk. And that other, more sporadic kind of writing, if it comes to me, arrives as a great surge of information, and I can write pages and pages standing in the middle of the street feeling no shame or physical discomfort. Writing by hand is always, for me, tied to what happens to the body—it’s more visceral and less thought out. I would even say that all my books begin and end with writing by hand. They are notes that come to me very clearly, and that contain the embryos of everything that will be built later (voice, tone, narrator, atmosphere, etc). So, writing on the computer is what takes up the most time, but that doesn’t mean it’s the most important.
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