I sympathize better with people who had trouble with Borges after reading Fever Dream; I had no idea what was going on for large sections of the novel. I didn’t mind too much, though, and disorientation was obviously Schweblin’s intent. While I was mostly able to follow along with the main narrative, I couldn’t figure out the meaning of the structure of the book as a dialogue between Amanda and David. I thought that it had something to do with their souls being migrated to the same body via the woman in the green house, but also considered that they could just be in parallel beds in the hospital. At some points, it even seemed that they were conversing beyond the grave a la Pedro Páramo, a book that shared a lot of similarities with this one; I wonder whether Rulfo was a conscious influence on Schweblin while writing.

A couple people commented last week on the cinematic elements of My Tender Matador, how it felt as if it were written to be made into a movie. Though I myself didn’t get that impression from Lemebel, I felt something similar in Fever Dream. Maybe this is just because “psychological thriller” is a genre I’ve been exposed to through film more than literature, but this felt like something that could have been directed by David Lynch or Darren Aronofsky: a confusing flash of images that the reader is mostly left to piece together. Of course, Pedro Páramo does something similar, but Schweblin’s style seemed far more contemporary and visual than Rulfo’s writing. The use of the present tense helped in this: rather than recounting the story as something that happened in the past, its presentation makes it feel as if it is taking place in front of you, even while the narrators’ commentary makes it clear that these are memories. This cinematic feeling really reflects how new this book is compared to everything else we’ve read; I couldn’t imagine a 20^th-century author using a style so obviously influenced by modern film techniques.

As for the central theme of the story: I think my prior knowledge that the book was about water pollution lessened the disorienting effect (it was clear what the cause of the sickness was) while increasing anxiety in those scenes where water is present. Despite my expectations that this theme would be used in an explicitly political, environmentalist way, however, it really didn’t feel like a “political” story, at least not in the same way as other books we’ve read (basically everything except Borges and Neruda in my case). While these books have scaled from implicit (Hour of the Star) to explicit (I, Rigoberta Menchú) in the ways that they address the intersections of individual lives with broader social and political issues, Fever Dream’s political content was so implicit that I never would have guessed that such themes were even a concern if I didn’t know that background. This could also reflect the book’s relative recency; rather than taking place in an era of revolutions, dictatorships, and “modernization” where politics are obviously front and center, it comes at a time when political and economic forces are increasingly invisible and insidious, even while remaining as powerful as ever.

Did others notice further ways in which this book feels more recent/contemporary than other books we’ve read?