Though David survives the migration, he is deeply altered. This “migration,” the woman tells Carla, “will have its consequences.” David will not be the same anymore.
In the story that David is extracting from Amanda, she says he had once been fatally poisoned by a substance in the local water and, in order to save him, his mother Carla took him to the “woman in the green house” who promised to split his soul.
Amanda also has a child, Nina, but Nina and Carla only appear in the book within the framework of David and Amanda’s conversation.
Carla and Amanda both have summer homes in a remote, bucolic village. We soon find out his name is David and hers is Amanda, and that he is the child of her friend Carla. He already has the answers but he is making her work through a story – one that they share – to find them herself. He opens by saying to her They’re like worms. A boy is whispering into her ear – questions, prompts. A woman is in a bed and she cannot see well, though we cannot tell if this is because her eyes are failing or because the room itself is in darkness. The setup is incredibly still – almost motionless – and reveals itself slowly. While the plots of all great novels are in the service of a larger idea, it’s particularly hard to talk about the plot of Fever Dream because it is so secondary to the intuitions of the book. After finishing, I slept with the lights on. About halfway through, I reopened reviews of the book on my Kindle in order to make sure it was, in fact, a real book, and not just something that was happening to me. Schweblin has already established herself in both her native Argentina and the United States as a writer-to-watch with her innovative, fantastic short stories, and the reviews for Fever Dream excited me – Constance Grady at Vox called it “unsettling.” Jia Tolentino at The New Yorker said it was a “sick thrill.” Most advised it should be read in one sitting. Never before has a book made me feel as if it was watching me. But do not mistake me: this is one of the scariest books I’ve ever read. Schweblin has a singular talent for evoking the sensation of fear rather than working to scare the reader with gore or shock. I’m still not sure what kind of book Fever Dream is – part fable, part ecocriticism, all panic.
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