The disturbing realism of Samanta Schweblin, between Kafka and Salinger

With a prose that plays the edge of the fantastic without ever abandoning reality (everything happens within the reader’s mind), Schweblin questions in all of them the Normality idea: «You are an absolutely subjective being, full of anomalies, of things that make you unique. And I am this other. Then there is a point in the middle between the two that would be normal, but it is an invention, it is a cultural, social pact. Of course, we need some automation in what we do in a day -to -day basis, because if not life would be hell, but there is nothing truly real. So, in the end, the most true ends up being the strange ».

‘The good evil’ opens the way to the relaunch of his work with ‘Rescue distance’ (taken to the cinema by Claudia Llosa for Netflix), which in April will be completed with ‘Birds in La Boca’ (National Fund of the Arts and Casa de las Américas) and ‘Kentukis’. Schweblin’s books, translated into forty languages ​​and with which he has become a finalist three times of the International Booker Price, stand out for the impact that his reading causes on the reader, whose expansive wave, both in a novel and in a short story, revolves around the restlessness.

Although she declares himself above all a storyteller, he points out that when he writes «I do not think in terms of gender. I do not say: ‘I’m going to write a story’ or ‘I’m going to write a novel’. What I think is that I have a story between hands, a number of objects that They begin to dialogue between sí, to confront yourself, to problematize. And the amount of pages I end up arriving is a conclusion of that movement ».

With the collections of stories follow the same philosophy: «For me, a Tales book It is not a gain of small things that I am writing between novel and novel. It’s a project itselfwhich has a message. It is something organic where all the stories that are, are for something ». ‘The good evil’ began to take shape three years ago, from death. “It occupies so much place in the literature that it is almost always present, but most of the time is in the end,” he reflects. «I wondered if it was possible to write something where death was the opening and, nevertheless, no gender line was crossed. Let us not talk about ghosts, even living dead, or science fiction. Can it be done from realism? Thus, ‘Welcome to the community’, the first story, which was initially going to take the same title of the book.

Realism in Schweblin is an ambiguous border. Influenced by Cortázar, Bradbury and Kafkabut also by Cheever, Carver and Salinger, their stories are plagued by elements that challenge logic without abandoning the territory of the possible. For her, the disturbing arises from the same human nature. What events are able to break your inertia? «All these invisible forces that command our lives, which have to do with the mandates we have raised with, the fears that push us to make certain decisions, the sometimes wrong ideas of who we are … all that works as energies that push us and generate this trend so strong from which it is so difficult to come out. What puts that in check? What breaks suddenly, paralyzes, and makes you look and say: ‘What the Fuck?’ That force is what For me is evilin quotes. Because if that is what makes strength, it’s not evil then, right? Of course, really, how bad is there in good? How much does evil bring? What results from that collapse between those two forces? Under the influence of these two questions is that all stories are born ».

Non -return point

Deeply vulnerable, his characters are just at the moment that he will change their lives forever, either for suicide attempts, accidents, deaths or terminal illnesses. The inevitable background of all of them are family relationships. Schweblin acknowledges that, although the family is not the center of their stories, it is present in each. «You can’t come to this world without that first relationship. We are all children. Even the one who has no mother, or the one who is fought, perhaps even has a stronger presence of that mother than the one.

That paradox between the proximity and the impossibility of communicating the essential appears in several stories. A son who tries, without success, to tell his father something important. A distance love that leaves impossible traces. Stories where the affective is debated between the connection and the invisible barrier that separates us from others. Schweblin keeps the tension between the care and damage. «There is a limit that has a lot to do with good and evil. How much are you hurting when you take care of? We assume what hurts from a very personal point of view. And we are going to cure that, what we think we would like to be cured us. But it cannot be formed without deforming. There is a noise that is very interesting. And even more interesting is what happens upside down, what happens to those who arrive apparently loaded with evil and suddenly rearrange priorities and energies ».

The author’s balances keep the reader suspended in that area where the only thing left is the need to continue reading. «When we read, as happens with daily life, we are a specular machine. All the time we are anticipating what will happen. But there is a time when what is happening is so unpublished that the predictions are over. You are suspended. And that is the time where you are really paying attention. There are the protagonists of ‘The Good Evil’.