Fever Dream: A Novel

Brilliant, concise. Woman and child, from any big city (but probably Buenos Aires), arrive at a vacation house along a river. Husband will join them for the weekend. Neighbor wearing a gold bikini brings them a bucket of water, says not to drink the tap water; it smells bad. But they already have, just a little when they arrived thirsty.Every genre, even horror, has great writers.The resources of our world have largely been destroyed. No where to hide. Fictional version of Blowout by Rachel Maddow.As I go into Month 5 of coronavirus lockdown, hidden away in the desert like one of a friend's rescue dogs, lines from Fever Dreams surface. Pay attention. Things that look like nothing (sitting on damp grass) are important. My friend's desperate need for social interaction. Okay, she is invested in being kind but why is Friend in our tiny Post Office lobby talking to the one man in town who tested positive for the virus? Why does his mask not cover his nose? He says masks are to block sputum from spraying. But the disease gets into the vascular system through the lungs, air going in and out through nose and mouth. Has she contracted the disease? Will she bring it home? She and I are wearing masks. Is that enough? Is my throat a little sore? My pandemic mantra is that I am safe and have a roof over my head. The second half is true. Is the woman in the book hallucinating her mother and son friends? Am I hallucinating the danger? Is neighbor downplaying the danger so he can go inside the Post Office and the Store? We had to do a 14 day self-quarantine when I returned from overseas, driven back from a country that didn't have much of a problem then and has a huge problem now. Did he? My friend in Belarus saying a huge number of children have birth defects from Chernobyl. Chernobyl is fuming again but wasn't when I was there.Planetary pandemics. The places I paid for but now cannot get to. The crazy college kids who went to Mexico anyway. Death. Long term medical conditions. Student who tested positive but has no symptoms so he doesn't care. My lost travel deposits and purchases. Collapsed businesses, lost jobs, corruption. Suddenly the best you can hope for is to be safe and have a roof over your head.

Kudos to the author of one of the most unique books I have ever read. Mind boggling. I would have given this book 5 stars but the ending was ... OUCH!

One of those quick page turners that you just can’t put down. Literally a fever dream.

I read Fever Dream in one sitting because it was absolutely gripping. At the same time, it was also incredibly sad. I’m not a parent but I feel that many parents will be able to relate to Amanda and Carla in this novella. A parent is always aware of the rescue distance between them and their child and that worry of danger to your child is always present in the back of your mind. Schweblin focuses quite a bit on that aspect of being a parent and how a mother always feels that invisible rope to their child.Another theme I felt this book dealt with is the devastation of the environment. In today’s economy, farms are being pumped with dangerous pesticides that hurt all forms of life that reside in the area. Fever Dream illustrates the human toll that capitalism has taken and how there is no justice for those people who have gotten sick by the chemicals in their environment.Lastly, there were some surreal moments surrounding the transmigration of the soul. For being such a short read it had a powerful emotional impact on me and I definitely look forward to reading more of Schweblin’s work in the future.

This really was named appropriately. It felt like a damn fever dream to read. I wasn’t really sure what was happening throughout it at first and it never got fully cleared up. Now, to be brutally honest with myself here, I don’t think I was invested enough to care about the layers of themes. I felt very underwhelmed while I read this and I think that’s why I didn’t become attached. However, I also have to be honest in my naivety while reading it. The why is what bothered me the most. I didn’t like the characters, I didn’t enjoy the format of a trippy interrogation but what I do understand was that this book wasn’t meant for pure enjoyment. It’s themes were always meant to be the main focus, from what I can tell. It was eerie in the sense that it builds a lot of anticipation about some very upsetting issues in family and society but for me, that delivery style was missed since I was so uninterested which bummed me out. The themes, however, were always present. I didn’t enjoy this book, but I’d be a bad reviewer if I let my personal taste determine a horrible review because this author seemingly wanted to make a point and, it was made. Strong feelings of negligence were portrayed in this story, from the parents, from the town, even from the world. I also felt highly underwhelmed at the end and instead of feeling like a novella with a manipulated story meant to invoke a sense of duty and care in the reader, it felt like a paper meant to hide a theme within a plot. By the end, i just wanted to re-read thinking I’d missed something. But, I can honestly say I didn’t enjoy this read on a personal level, even if I do believe this was simply a style issue for me from the author. I think overall, I respect this book for what it’s purpose seemingly is, but it wouldn’t be something I’d recommend unless you enjoy societal themes masked by fictional works which is not what I read this book for since it claims to be a horror.

Fever Dream is NOT what I expected. When it begins, it is extremely abstract; this is not a story in which every character is introduced before they play a role in the book's narrative. There are muddled conversations and nonsensical dialogue as Amanda, the book's protagonist, lies in a state of semi-consciousness. Although this abstract-style DOES continue throughout the book, it begins to make more and more sense as the story progresses, and Amanda begins to remember what happened to her.Amanda's story is one that is REALLY chilling. This was a one-day read for me, which tells you quite a lot about how compelling I found the narrative. It is just so tense. Whether this is because children are involved, or because of something else, there is something about this story that makes it INCREDIBLE to read.Perhaps my main issue with Fever Dream is that the story isn't concluded in a way that left me satisfied. There are still quite a few loose ends, and even though they are quite interesting to think about, I felt as though I could have benefitted from a little more information - particularly regarding the children of this story.Nevertheless, I did enjoy the slight ambiguity of the VERY final moment; this was an ending that really made me think. Honestly, there are twists in this story that will leave you reeling. After finishing it, I feel as though my brain has been fried; it is an incredibly well-written book, and it is definitely one I can wholeheartedly recommend.

This review first appeared on scifiandscary.com‘Fever Dream’ is as hypnotic, bewitching and nightmarish as its title suggests. It’s short (shorter than the quoted 194 pages suggests, I read it on Kindle, but I’m guessing the printed edition must have a pretty large font to have filled that many pages) and demands to be read in one sitting, pulling the reader through the story with no chapters or breaks, just a constant stream of mysterious events. It’s hard to classify, marketed as literary fiction (and shortlisted for the Man Booker International prize in 2017), but filled with an existential dread that seeps into your bones and packed with hints of the paranormal and body swapping that are familiar from genre novels.Whilst this isn’t a ghost story, it often feels like one, adopting the narrative technique common in supernatural fiction of the events being relayed by one character to another. In fact the whole book takes the form of a conversation between a young woman (Amanda) and a mysterious child (David), as he sits at her bedside in hospital. Neither of them are reliable narrators and like a lot of the best fantastic fiction, it is often hard to tell whether the apparently magical events described have actually taken place or have been imagined or invented by the characters.The story they tell each other centres on a strange sickness that has afflicted David, with events quickly spiralling to pull in Amanda’s daughter, Nina, and David’s mother, Carla. ‘Fever Dream’ examines maternal love in detail; the two mothers have very different relationships with their children, allowing the writer to portray both a sympathetic mother and one whose reaction to her child is more challenging but perhaps not totally unfamiliar. Schweblin uses the notion of “rescue distance” to describe the amount of physical separation a mother can stand from a young child, a concept that immediately resonated with me as a parent, and her description of familial love is convincing and adds an emotional depth to the story that makes it even more compelling. Beyond the parent/child relationships, ‘Fever Dream’ casts a light on societal responsibility to future generations, subtly weaving in pollution and GM crops to the story.There is a pervading sense of dread throughout, with the central mysteries of the book forcing the reader to conjure up their own terrible answers to the questions the characters ask each other about what has happened to them. I don’t read a great deal of translated fiction, but Megan McDowell seems to have done a great job of translating this into English from its original Spanish. The conversational prose is naturalistic and engaging and makes the story more credible than a less accomplished telling might have. It certainly never has the distracting clunkiness that some European thrillers I have read in translation have been cursed with.If you haven’t guessed already, I found the book utterly gripping, it captured my attention like nothing I have read recently, and the deliberate ambiguity has left me preoccupied with it since reading the final page. It’s a great piece of horror fiction, even if you won’t necessarily find it on the horror shelves of your local bookstore.

As a parent this book was not fun to read. That being said, it was intensely gripping and I could barely put it down, the speed and the tension were really well managed - a genuine page turner if you are looking for something to get through in one sitting.

WTF was all that about?Damned if I know!!!Mildly interesting, but with no real explanation of what actually happened!Left me feeling empty and frustrated!

My book was ordered on the 27th of April and was supposed to arrive on the 1st of May, but it has arrived today and it’s in a very good condition. So, overall experience from this seller is positive.