“Strange can be quite normal. Strange can just be the phrase, ‘That is not important,’ as an answer for everything. But if your son never answered you that way before, then the fourth time you ask him why he’s not eating, or if he’s cold, or you send him to bed, and he answers, almost biting off the words as if he were still learning to talk, ‘That is not important,’ I swear to you, Amanda, your legs start to tremble.” 1
‘Distancia de rescate,’ or ‘Fever Dream’ in its unfortunately adapted English title, is a remarkable work by the award-winning Argentine author Samanta Schweblin. Recognized as one of the best Spanish-speaking authors under 35, Schweblin is a humble queen of compact, all-consuming stories that devour you while you consume them. Her work masterfully delves into unsettling realities.
Anyone drawn to the kind of immersive horror that emerges from the female psyche will recognize how Schweblin often situates herself at the intersection of female experience and the unfathomable. This novel is not one of plot, thought, or mystery, but rather a novel of horror-between-your-ears sensation. It could be classified as a new literary hybrid—a mix of theatrical prose and enigmatic storytelling where terror creeps into the mundane, much like in Schweblin’s other works.
The plot follows Amanda, who vacations in the countryside with her daughter, Nina, while awaiting the weekend arrival of her husband. Amanda meets Clara, a young mother with a son named David, who narrates to her a fairy tale-like story of how her child became a stranger. Following a severe poisoning incident, Clara made the harrowing decision to “remove his soul” to save him. What remains is David’s body, inhabited by something unmistakably non-childlike.
The story unfolds through the feverish, hallucinatory dialogue between Amanda-seemingly dying in a hospital bed-and David, a child in appearance but not in essence. Amanda clings to her instinctive ‘safe distance’-‘distancia de rescate’-a visceral, maternal bond she describes as an invisible rope tethering her belly to her child. This connection becomes her driving force amidst her delirium as she fights to protect her own daughter, Nina.
Schweblin explores motherhood with a subtle, surreal intensity. Children in her stories often seem otherworldly-creatures that resemble children but express desires in unnervingly adult ways. In her previous book, Pájaros en la boca (Mouthful of Birds), a teenage girl suddenly wakes up to find she can only fulfill her hunger by eating birds alive. Mothers, on the other hand, are constantly running-chasing after a fleeting sense of childhood, struggling to preserve it against forces beyond their control.
Similarly, in Elena Ferrante’s “The Lost Daughter”, Leda, a 48-year-old academic vacationing alone on a Greek island, is confronted by memories of her own motherhood. Watching a young mother, Nina, and her daughter triggers flashbacks to her past, where ambition, frustration, and the overwhelming responsibility of motherhood led Leda to leave her family for three years. The doll that Nina’s daughter treasures becomes a fetishized object for Leda, symbolizing her unresolved guilt and longing.
Both Schweblin and Ferrante explore the maternal experience with strikingly different approaches to its horror. Schweblin presents a quiet, surreal dread-the realization that your child is no longer truly a child, a revelation that tears at your core. Ferrante, on the other hand, portrays the raw anger and resignation of a mother who confronts the unbearable truth that her children remain inscrutably distant from her psyche, precisely because they are children.
Despite their differences, the works of Schweblin and Ferrante create a maternal symmetry of tenderness and fury and reading their works back to back is reshaping our understanding of literature’s capacity to evoke both the familiar and the uncanny, often in the same breath. These books, when read back-to-back, feel like neighboring apartments-connected yet separated by a wall, unable to face each other directly.
