Thomas Mann’s 1940 novella The Transposed Heads dealt with an ancient folk legend—a person’s head is severed and affixed to the body of another. So the bodies have been interchanged. The wife now faces a conundrum—which of the two people does she take to be her husband? Which of the two is the original person? Samanta Schweblin’s Man Booker prize long-listed novella Fever Dream grapples with a similar question. Carla’s son David is afflicted with a terrible illness which threatens his life. A local healer says she can ‘move’ David’s soul into another body, which will halve the severity of the illness. Carla acquiesces, but is now faced with someone who is not David at all.
Fever Dream unravels from this point in a intricately layered narrative. The chief narrative device is made up of conversations between David and Amanda in a hospital bed. While Amanda is garrulous, David is the critical listener. He draws out memories of his past from her, ruthlessly swatting away details he does not deem necessary. Amanda is sent through the wringer as she is haunted by memories of her daughter, who too is threatened by David’s illness. Schweblin’s multifarious novel effortlessly sews in myriad details, with an equal regard for all the characters.
We traverse times, spaces and lives of people. The author makes the setting sparse and dark at times, and vivid at others, depending on David’s mood. Each character is in conflict with the other in some way and each wants to express himself or herself the loudest. Schweblin brings each character to life and exculpates each to find a balance that is difficult to arrive at in a fiction of this length.
Fever Dream runs at a feverish pace—pun intended—and keeps itself taut. It rests mostly in the realms of memory and recollection but resists the clichéd tendency to indulge in reminiscences. The author treats the past as malleable—revisiting it regularly, but picking out only the necessary aspects. At one point, she places us in a farmhouse and draws out a landscape, and then turns the narrator around, telling us that the gate at the far end of the scene is unnecessary at that point of time. She revisits it later when it gains importance. Schweblin’s third book will take you less than a night to read, but it will keep you ruminating for long.
Fever Dream; Samanta Schweblin, trs Megan McDowell, Oneworld, ₹350.
