“‘We’re lost’, says my mother.”
This a a recent collection of Samanta Schweblin stories, and like all Samanta Schweblin books I’ve read, I was left at the end of this one not really being entirely sure what I just read, or if I liked it. So it goes.
The stories here, as the title suggests, are about displacement, sometimes physical, sometimes emotional, sometimes metaphysical. The stories are anchored by a long central novella and like a lot of collections that is the most realized and polished stories, and the rest is a mixed bag.
One story that especially stands out to me is the long careful exploration of an old woman with dementia still living in her house by herself. At first it’s not clear what is going on, the reader’s experience paralleling the woman’s, but it eventually emerges about her disability. In the hands of Schweblin though what might ordinarily be a sympathetic exploration of this situation becomes a horror story. Specifically, the woman with the dementia, sympathetic as her situation might be, is terrorizing her neighbor. In an earlier time, our protagonist saw her neighbor’s son face down on the street on the brink of death, but not knowing or understanding that the boy was in crisis, did nothing. Only later did she tell her neighbor what she saw, again not realizing that she was confessing, through her inability, to allowing the boy to die. Now, she finds herself knocking on her neighbor’s door over and over, sometimes asking her where her son is, and sometimes confessing again to allowing him to die. The repetition and the inability for the neighbor to stop her or to heal from the moment turns trauma into a cyclical experience.
In Praise of Folly