I read this week’s book in Spanish instead of English, which I guess that helped me sometimes when I was getting lost or confused. Despite intriging and exciting, I found the novel to be very abstract and confusing at many times. It took me a bit to understand who the characters were and the relationship they had with each other, especially because the narrative of the story isn’t always linear. Moreover, I was sometimes “tricked” by the conversations and the stories that the characters tell, especially by David’s questions, theories, and guesses. David disregards Amanda’s thoughts and concentrates on what he deems important by constantly posing questions and developing theories. However, there are occasions when he has the answers to Amanda’s inquiries but allows her to discover the information, causing additional confusion for the reader. In fact, while reading the story, sometimes i felt like Amanda, slowly understanding the story and the underlying events, but simultaneously very confused and perplexed about what is happening.

The book narrates the story of Amanda and Nina, mother and daughter, who while staying in a town in a rural area of Argentina, they contract a disease, a disease that apparently many people in the town have. We never fully understand as a reader what the disease is or what exactly is causing this “epidemic” in the area, and this confusion around the topic is, in my opinion, one of the auhtor’s objectives for her novel. The character of Amanda, who is hospitalized due to this disease, never understand her situation or how she ended up being sick, providing more questions rather than answers. However, we do get the idea that people who are infected are seen as a plague, weird people with deformities and abnormalities that are destined to live a miserable life or die. “Son chicos extraños. Son, no sé, arde mucho. Chicos con deformaciones. No tienen pestañas, ni cejas, la piel es colorada, muy colorada, y escamosa también.” This quote in Spanish is explaining how poeple who contracted the disease are explicitly “weird”, without eyebrows, eyelashes, and even scaly skin. Moreover, despite getting the feeling that Amanda doesn’t always understand her situation and has uncertainty about it, she has the intuition that she is going to die and shows impressively accepting, straightforward attitude about it . “But I’m going to die in a few hours. That’s going to happen, isn’t it? It’s strange how calm I am. Because even though you haven’t told me, I know. And still, it’s an impossible thing to tell yourself.”

Finally, I wanted to point out the fact that the original title in Spanish is “Distancia de Rescate”, “Rescue Distance” in English, despite the title being different after the translation. The “rescue distance” that Amanda talks about is the safety distance that a mother needs to be away from their child to protect them, to save them. For instance, when Amanda explains she is calculating how long it would take her “to jump out of the car and reach Nina if she suddenly ran and leapt into the pool.” After reading the book, I thought that despite the especial meaning of the title in Spanish, “Fever Dream” better describes the experience that Amanda is having in the story, a state of feverish delirium and confusion. Subsequently, it is also a metaphor of the experience that we get as readers: disoriented, confused, and unsure about what is real and what is not, and at the same time, fascinated and intrigued to understand what is really happening, what the truth is.

How much do you think a title of book can affect the reader’s experience and understanding of the story? Did you feel identified with Amanda in any ways while reading the novel?