Scan barcode
edengabel's review
dark
emotional
inspiring
lighthearted
mysterious
reflective
sad
fast-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? No
5.0
spenkevich's review against another edition
3.0
*Winner of the 2022 National Book Award for Translated Fiction*
Our homes are our safe places, or so we would like to believe. How easily and quickly that peace can be ruptured and we realize how thin the walls, how unguarded the gates, or how fragile the lives inside truly are. In Seven Empty Houses, the newest translated work from Samanta Schweblin, the Argentine master of uneasiness that brought us the tightly packed terrors of [b:Fever Dream|30763882|Fever Dream|Samanta Schweblin|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1471279721l/30763882._SX50_.jpg|42701168], the concept of homes and stability is constantly challenged. And not just from externally. Across these seven stories the idea of home becomes a space of disquiet as Schwebelin instills the anxieties of her narrator’s into the reader until we, too, are rocked by emotional discomfort. Neighbors begin to take on a tone of menace and grief cannot be held out even by locking the door. Beautifully translated by [a:Megan McDowell|3392728|Megan McDowell|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1442512481p2/3392728.jpg], Seven Empty Houses is a chilling little collection that examines the spaces left by loss, our association with our own possessions (or lack of) and how stability and wellbeing is a fragile concept always ready to collapse.
‘What kind of madness was all that?’
Schweblin is able to turn any situation into one rife with fear, something best exemplified in all the domestic horrors in her previous short story collection, [b:Mouthful of Birds|39872813|Mouthful of Birds|Samanta Schweblin|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1524088122l/39872813._SY75_.jpg|6753362]. There is a uniqueness to her frights though, more creeping dread and unease than blunt terror which she builds by placing the reader in a narrator’s mind being destabalized by the vagueness and subtly threatening atmospheres around them. Houses plays with tropes of haunted houses, with grief being the lingering ghost to haunt the occupants (though one narrator does receive ghostly visits, something we are unsure is a haunting of specters or a haunted mind). The streets of Buenos Aires are cast in gothic atmospheres in stories such as Two Square Feet or Out, the former story featuring a woman on a quest for a pharmacy and the latter with a woman escaping a difficult conversation with her husband to wander the labyrinthian streets in just a bathrobe, both at night in the harsh contrast of shadows and streetlights. With Schweblin there is no need for monsters, as we are often our own most terrifying threats, a theme well explored in her look at our inability to use social technology without turning it into a nightmare in her previous novel, Little Eyes.
‘She was sitting on two square feet, and that was all the space she took up in the world.’
Occupying your own space is a concept always threatened in these stories, and windows figure prominently in several stories as a reminder of the gaze of our neighbors and society that seems bent on voyeurism into our personal lives. In It Happens All the Time in This House, even something as commonplace as taking out the trash becomes an opportunity for judgment from others, with the garbage man returning a bag of old clothes from the curb because they could be put to better use. Clothes become another common symbol in these stories, often as reminders of people now past or the selves we once were, and in the same story a couple’s feuding always ends with their deceased son’s clothes scattered in the neighbors yard. My Parents and Children a surreal story about the mental deterioration of a man’s parents—resulting running around the neighborhood leaving a trail of removed clothes in their wake—runs parallel to the deterioration of his former marriage as a new lover begins to replace him as a father figure.
In these ways, possessions are often used as a signifier of one’s life. Packing objects into boxes becomes highly symbolic in several of these, such as the longest story Breath from the Depths where packing up a life is mirrored in the narrator's desire to pack up her life into the grave, or Two Square Feet where the boxes are a constant reminder of her transitional state and instability in life. Though the lack of objects also resonates with ideas of loss as well. The opening story, None of That, which is one of my favorites and made me feel so uncomfortable urging the characters to ‘get out of there’ with the same intensity of discomfort as in the scene hiding under the table in the film Parasite, features a mother’s fascination with fancy homes contrasting with her own lack. She is distraught that the people who have don’t even seem to appreciate what they have or know how to care for it like she can. It makes for a deliciously distressing story as the narrator must watch their mother’s instability threaten her own safety as she also watches the horror of the young mother and her own child as this woman races about their home.
The use of contrasting homes and houses speaks of a larger class issue, but also just a desire to be seen and understood by those who would turn their nose up otherwise.
As is often with Schweblin, she hits parental horror the hardest. Which was a great success for her in [b:Fever Dream|30763882|Fever Dream|Samanta Schweblin|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1471279721l/30763882._SX50_.jpg|42701168]. Here we often gaze into the absence left behind by the loss of a child, resonating years and years later such as in Breath from the Depths, a story featuring two different families that face the death of their sons. But there is also the horrors of seeing a child in peril or being unable to help. The Unlucky Man is a particularly good story that combines many of the themes, such as how the young girl narrating the story sees what should be the stability of joy on a birthday become a nightmare of a night. Her sister swallowing bleach, causing chaos as the family rushes to the hospital feels like a ‘affront’ to her. Later, sitting in the hospital without underpants, she must navigate by herself a man who is either a helpful stranger or, more likely, a sexual predator. The fear on the face of the parents in the final scene is palpable.
‘A deterioration that led knowhere.’
The longest story, Breath from the Depths is more a novella than a short story and deals with all the themes of loss and deterioration from the failing mind of an old woman wishing for her own death as she begins ‘to fear the worst: that death required an effort she could no longer make.’ She suspects everyone of foul play, distrusting the neighbors and suspecting unhealthy relationships forming between her aged husband and the 12 year old boy next store. It is the best in the collection and is quite distressing, all culminating into a left-hook punch of a conclusion.
‘Say something to solve this problem.’
Life comes alive in all its menace in the words of Schweblin and Seven Empty Houses is a minor-key collection of anxieties. Winner of the National Book Award for Translation, this is a hit that holds to its themes like a center of gravity but allows the stories to drift in creative ways to address the themes from a wide variety of vantage points. Schweblin will sink under your skin in the best ways.
3.5/5
Our homes are our safe places, or so we would like to believe. How easily and quickly that peace can be ruptured and we realize how thin the walls, how unguarded the gates, or how fragile the lives inside truly are. In Seven Empty Houses, the newest translated work from Samanta Schweblin, the Argentine master of uneasiness that brought us the tightly packed terrors of [b:Fever Dream|30763882|Fever Dream|Samanta Schweblin|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1471279721l/30763882._SX50_.jpg|42701168], the concept of homes and stability is constantly challenged. And not just from externally. Across these seven stories the idea of home becomes a space of disquiet as Schwebelin instills the anxieties of her narrator’s into the reader until we, too, are rocked by emotional discomfort. Neighbors begin to take on a tone of menace and grief cannot be held out even by locking the door. Beautifully translated by [a:Megan McDowell|3392728|Megan McDowell|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1442512481p2/3392728.jpg], Seven Empty Houses is a chilling little collection that examines the spaces left by loss, our association with our own possessions (or lack of) and how stability and wellbeing is a fragile concept always ready to collapse.
‘What kind of madness was all that?’
Schweblin is able to turn any situation into one rife with fear, something best exemplified in all the domestic horrors in her previous short story collection, [b:Mouthful of Birds|39872813|Mouthful of Birds|Samanta Schweblin|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1524088122l/39872813._SY75_.jpg|6753362]. There is a uniqueness to her frights though, more creeping dread and unease than blunt terror which she builds by placing the reader in a narrator’s mind being destabalized by the vagueness and subtly threatening atmospheres around them. Houses plays with tropes of haunted houses, with grief being the lingering ghost to haunt the occupants (though one narrator does receive ghostly visits, something we are unsure is a haunting of specters or a haunted mind). The streets of Buenos Aires are cast in gothic atmospheres in stories such as Two Square Feet or Out, the former story featuring a woman on a quest for a pharmacy and the latter with a woman escaping a difficult conversation with her husband to wander the labyrinthian streets in just a bathrobe, both at night in the harsh contrast of shadows and streetlights. With Schweblin there is no need for monsters, as we are often our own most terrifying threats, a theme well explored in her look at our inability to use social technology without turning it into a nightmare in her previous novel, Little Eyes.
‘She was sitting on two square feet, and that was all the space she took up in the world.’
Occupying your own space is a concept always threatened in these stories, and windows figure prominently in several stories as a reminder of the gaze of our neighbors and society that seems bent on voyeurism into our personal lives. In It Happens All the Time in This House, even something as commonplace as taking out the trash becomes an opportunity for judgment from others, with the garbage man returning a bag of old clothes from the curb because they could be put to better use. Clothes become another common symbol in these stories, often as reminders of people now past or the selves we once were, and in the same story a couple’s feuding always ends with their deceased son’s clothes scattered in the neighbors yard. My Parents and Children a surreal story about the mental deterioration of a man’s parents—resulting running around the neighborhood leaving a trail of removed clothes in their wake—runs parallel to the deterioration of his former marriage as a new lover begins to replace him as a father figure.
In these ways, possessions are often used as a signifier of one’s life. Packing objects into boxes becomes highly symbolic in several of these, such as the longest story Breath from the Depths where packing up a life is mirrored in the narrator's desire to pack up her life into the grave, or Two Square Feet where the boxes are a constant reminder of her transitional state and instability in life. Though the lack of objects also resonates with ideas of loss as well. The opening story, None of That, which is one of my favorites and made me feel so uncomfortable urging the characters to ‘get out of there’ with the same intensity of discomfort as in the scene hiding under the table in the film Parasite, features a mother’s fascination with fancy homes contrasting with her own lack. She is distraught that the people who have don’t even seem to appreciate what they have or know how to care for it like she can. It makes for a deliciously distressing story as the narrator must watch their mother’s instability threaten her own safety as she also watches the horror of the young mother and her own child as this woman races about their home.
’That’s how I realize what it is that I want. I want her to look. I want her to move our things. I want her to inspect, set aside, and take apart. To remove everything from the boxes, to trample, rearrange, to throw herself on the ground, and also to cry.’
The use of contrasting homes and houses speaks of a larger class issue, but also just a desire to be seen and understood by those who would turn their nose up otherwise.
As is often with Schweblin, she hits parental horror the hardest. Which was a great success for her in [b:Fever Dream|30763882|Fever Dream|Samanta Schweblin|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1471279721l/30763882._SX50_.jpg|42701168]. Here we often gaze into the absence left behind by the loss of a child, resonating years and years later such as in Breath from the Depths, a story featuring two different families that face the death of their sons. But there is also the horrors of seeing a child in peril or being unable to help. The Unlucky Man is a particularly good story that combines many of the themes, such as how the young girl narrating the story sees what should be the stability of joy on a birthday become a nightmare of a night. Her sister swallowing bleach, causing chaos as the family rushes to the hospital feels like a ‘affront’ to her. Later, sitting in the hospital without underpants, she must navigate by herself a man who is either a helpful stranger or, more likely, a sexual predator. The fear on the face of the parents in the final scene is palpable.
‘A deterioration that led knowhere.’
The longest story, Breath from the Depths is more a novella than a short story and deals with all the themes of loss and deterioration from the failing mind of an old woman wishing for her own death as she begins ‘to fear the worst: that death required an effort she could no longer make.’ She suspects everyone of foul play, distrusting the neighbors and suspecting unhealthy relationships forming between her aged husband and the 12 year old boy next store. It is the best in the collection and is quite distressing, all culminating into a left-hook punch of a conclusion.
‘Say something to solve this problem.’
Life comes alive in all its menace in the words of Schweblin and Seven Empty Houses is a minor-key collection of anxieties. Winner of the National Book Award for Translation, this is a hit that holds to its themes like a center of gravity but allows the stories to drift in creative ways to address the themes from a wide variety of vantage points. Schweblin will sink under your skin in the best ways.
3.5/5
jmc513's review
dark
mysterious
reflective
sad
tense
fast-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
3.5
kaleja's review against another edition
emotional
reflective
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? It's complicated
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
5.0
augureader's review against another edition
3.0
I thought this was… good. As with most short stories, some were good, and others were so-so. But I can’t remember many of the stories, but I do remember being quite uncomfortable reading a few of them. I’d pick up other works by Schweblin in the future.
maggiemcfly's review against another edition
dark
mysterious
tense
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? It's complicated
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
3.75
jes312's review against another edition
dark
emotional
sad
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? N/A
- Strong character development? No
- Loveable characters? No
- Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
3.5
Stories filled with uncomfortable emotions. "Breath From the Depths" is the best story; I wasn't really as invested in the others.
kathrinelar's review against another edition
4.0
Læste den på en dag. Den var virkelig god, historierne var hurtige og nemme at læse og forstå, og fangede mig stort set alle sammen