Good and evil dissolve in rich ambiguity in Samanta Schweblin’s anthology

Dying may not bring lucidity, but enacting it in the imagination may. The narrator in Samanta Schweblin’s story ‘Welcome to the Club’ attempts suicide by drowning and wonders if eternity is only some everlasting inertia. She changes her mind and returns to her home in which she has lived like a prisoner. Their rude neighbour skins and “opens like a book” a rabbit he has hunted down. He then asks her to kill her little daughters’ pet rabbit. The guilt will make her love the girls enough to not “damage” them by killing herself. The violence that drove her to attempt suicide is transferred to the shamanic ritual of sacrifice enacted in the imagination. She lets the actual rabbit go, but in the process she has skinned herself metaphorically and ripped herself open like a book, and turned the page.

The doubling effect between the woman and the rabbit is repeated in at least two more stories in this anthology. In ‘William in the Window’, it is between a cat and the narrator’s husband; in ‘The Fabulous Animal’, between a horse and a boy. The strange entanglements render our sense of reality suspect. Is our reality only derivative? Is it but a shadow? The precise, crystalline language, invested in sharp, exact detail, yields in every story a complexity that has the fascination of a mystery. The stories have resolutions, but resolutions are not answers.

Schweblin is a weaver of uncanny patterns that push the narrative over the edge. A precocious boy asks a woman, “Have you ever woken up for real?” He wants to become a flying horse, and falls to his death soon after. Precisely then a horse has fallen in the street outside.

A woman cannot leave her husband because the cat she loves belongs to him. The cat is poisoned and dies. She senses its presence around her and wonders if she is losing her sanity. Her friend sees the dead cat, but she sees too her own husband’s “blurry” palm impressed on the bathroom wall tiles. Has he died? She has always feared she will not survive his death, just as the woman whose cat has died has believed she will not survive her cat.

At the heart of Schweblin’s storytelling are relationships swimming in dread and love. ‘An Eye in the Throat’ is a mute son’s tale of losing a father behind a wall of silence and contrition. The father plunges into grief when he realises his error years later.

An alcoholic poet awaiting inspiration fascinates two little girls. They live out, in nightly escapades to her filthy home, their fantasy of serving the muse by looking after the poet who retreats into drunkenness to avoid sobriety which, she fears, will endanger others. They coax her out of alcoholism for one night, and one of them drowns in her sober company in the sea.

Slow, creeping psychological violence makes ‘A Visit from the Chief’ sit apart from other stories in the book. The cool, philosophical criminal, at once menacing and mesmerising, weaponises his old mother to enter homes without breaking in. But like the rude ‘master’ in ‘Welcome to the Club’, he too turns out to be a healer. The woman is rewarded with self-knowledge. He walks away with her cash and cards.

Schweblin makes narrative rationality collapse in story after story. An abyss opens, and good and evil dissolve in rich ambiguity. The meaning glows in the dark, sure yet unreachable.

— The reviewer is former professor of English at Punjabi University