Samanta Schweblin's Fever Dream: Watery Toxicity, Percolating Disquietude

Abstract

© 2022 by the Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System amanta Schweblin’s Fever Dream (Distancia de rescate) can be read as a literary exploration of disquietude: trepidation, apprehension, fear, and dread are the troubling affects that give the novel its distinctive “feeling tone.”1 The excerpts from the press reviews included in the English edition capture the overwhelming emotional potency that readers find in it: qualifiers such as “disquieting,” “thrilling,” “frightening,” “nauseous,” and “disturbing” all come up; “terrifying” and “eerie” appear more than once, with some reviewers vividly describing the “dread” and “fear” triggered by the book in striking bodily terms: “by the end I could hardly breathe,” writes Max Porter. Jesse Ball―whose novel The Curfew is quoted in Fever Dream’s epigraph―warns the reader: “Schweblin will injure you.”2 Fear, of course, is one of the emotions linked to the aesthetic experience since Aristotle’s study of tragedy; in her novel, Schweblin masterfully constructs a plot that interweaves contemporary anxieties around ecological disaster and environmental