On 'Fever Dream' & Surreal Structure
By the time I finished 'Fever Dream,' I was drenched in sweat, either from the heat of the sun or the heat of the narrative structure.
On Books…
When possible, I like to read books in as few sittings as possible. I love sitting down for hours at a time to lose myself in some strong fiction or a series of good essays, or an affecting memoir, or… You get the idea; I like to read. I have a dear friend who gives me book suggestions, I call her my #bookfren. She is a writer and reviewer who you can find here. We have a color-coded spreadsheet wherein she recommends me books and I recommend her albums in a symbiotic sharing relationship. Some of my favorite books have come by way of this spreadsheet, and Argentinian author Samanta Schweblin’s Fever Dream, translated by Megan McDowell, is no different.
I had no expectations going into Fever Dream, but the moment I cracked open the book and saw the structure, I knew I was in for a treat. The book boasts two central speakers, a woman, Amanda, on her deathbed, and a boy, David. This is not her son. David’s mother, Carla, makes appearances throughout a narration Amanda provides David as she slowly dies due to causes we struggle to discover as the novel unfolds. Things are important and unimportant. There is the concept of a “rescue distance.” The book is haunting, harrowing, disconcerting, and more. Fever Dream does indeed mimic the wonky and disturbing feeling of a fever dream, but with the added edge of uncertainty and horror.
Lately, I’ve been paying special attention to the structure of art pieces. I ask myself, “Is this the best way to present the narrative? Could something else have been done?” Fever Dream balks at my questions. It could only exist in this swirling form. As Jia Tolentino wrote back in 2017 for The New Yorker, there’s a “sick thrill” to Fever Dream: “Fever Dream is structured like a play, one that would require two actors and very little movement. The entire novel is an unbroken dialogue extruding from a void… Intertwined, these two dialogues form a shadow of an explanation—one that runs on nightmare logic, inexorable but elusive, and always just barely out of reach. ”
Fever Dream is at once surreal and excruciatingly tangible. As Amanda’s fear over her own daughter, Nina, and her own death, incoming, brews, we stir in our seats. Because of the way David’s dialog crawls out from the ether, because of his faceless appearance, we have nowhere to rest. It’s all plotted discomfort. We are meant to sit in the horror of the moment; we are meant to stew in our confusion. Far from frustrating, the structure of Fever Dream creates a thick tension. We turn each page hoping for respite, but instead, we get a flurry of questions. This book was not written to relax the mind.
A challenging structure does not simply promise engaged reading, but the technical marvel of Fever Dream hooked me one Sunday and did not let go until I was done reading the book while the harsh Philly sun bore down on me. By the time I finished Fever Dream, I was drenched in sweat, either from the heat of the sun or the heat of the narrative structure. I’m not sure where Fever Dream took me, but it certainly moved me from my patio furniture to somewhere more surreal, needling, and gnarly.
I’ll leave everyone with Tolentino’s brilliant conclusion: “The genius of Fever Dream is less in what it says than in how Schweblin says it, with a design at once so enigmatic and so disciplined that the book feels as if it belongs to a new literary genre altogether.”