A review by shanviolinlove
Seven Empty Houses by Samanta Schweblin
4.0
My third time reading Samanta Schweblin since becoming enraptured by her eerie novel Little Eyes and her more frustratingly narrated novel Fever Dream. This collection of short stories contains that same imbalance, commonplace characters in commonplace settings who do or perceive unusual things. The end result is chaos, disillusion, panic.
By far the strongest story in this collection is the longest one, "Breath from the Depths." No spoilers, but the pacing in this story as it unravels detail after detail is precise, precarious, and signature-Schweblin unsettling. I had a harder time feeling satisfied with some of the other stories, a trend I'm noticing in some contemporary Latin American short stories in that they end mere pages after they begin, introducing a plot and then wrapping up the story before even teasing out a climax. It's hard to get invested in characters or storyline when the stories are so abrupt, some of them more like snippets. Still, I do like the mystery that Schweblin's brevity lends: she deliberately leaves teasing unanswered questions in her stories. You get a glimpse of a strange world before you're pulled out of it, and you can only take whatever you had the chance to catch.
By far the strongest story in this collection is the longest one, "Breath from the Depths." No spoilers, but the pacing in this story as it unravels detail after detail is precise, precarious, and signature-Schweblin unsettling. I had a harder time feeling satisfied with some of the other stories, a trend I'm noticing in some contemporary Latin American short stories in that they end mere pages after they begin, introducing a plot and then wrapping up the story before even teasing out a climax. It's hard to get invested in characters or storyline when the stories are so abrupt, some of them more like snippets. Still, I do like the mystery that Schweblin's brevity lends: she deliberately leaves teasing unanswered questions in her stories. You get a glimpse of a strange world before you're pulled out of it, and you can only take whatever you had the chance to catch.