If I had to describe "Fever Dream" in more broad terms, it would include poisoning, dead animals, and white spots. If you like strange, and somewhat experimental books where the beginning, climax, and ending are never quite distinct or clear, this is the book for you! The book is structured as a dialogue between the characters, Amanda and a boy named David, and as such, it is wonderfully circuitous and strange. It describes Amanda's fears, such as voodoo, losing everything, fever dreams, trust issues, and more.
Moreover, the novel was quite the read, where it was so intense that you had to sit down and read all at once to get the full experience. As described during the lecture, "The novel puts us, the readers, in the same situation as Amanda" (lecture). This is precisely what happened to me, and my primary thought process was, "What is going on?". Thus, I suppose the title "Fever Dream" is very fitting in the sense that as a reader, I debated whether what I was reading was real, imagined, or a derangement of the mind.
More specifically, the novel told a very terrifying story, where some scenes were frightening. For example, there are no monsters, murders, or creatures, but what was frightening was a mysterious and unforeseen phenomenon that neither the reader or the character anticipated. To add, I enjoyed the way Samanta Schweblin took inspiration from the use of harmful pesticides in Argentina, and used horror to explore current issues. As agriculture, methane, coal, oil, gas, and other byproducts leave their mark on local communities, the public has become savvy and protests. However, we rarely saw what happened in other parts of the world where the legal infrastructure was not as developed, and the public needed to be better educated about the ways in which the benefits manifested themselves. The harmful effects of pesticides – a subject that might not be obvious to an urban reader of the book (I was unaware of it) is the curse of the town. "Fever Dream'' might be an ideal educational book for schools to create a solid attachment to the locals.
The story was unsettling, strange, and scary because I did not know what was happening. I would classify this book as literary horror not because it is scary but because it is unnerving, and as I read it, I could feel the threads inside me being wound tighter and tighter. I wish I could figure out how Schweblin does what she does here, but it is a feat!
Questions: As the unsettling story continues—is this a ghost story? A dream? A supernatural tale? Hallucinatory realism? How would you define the genre of this book?
"The story was unsettling, strange, and scary..." I really liked the classification you propose for this novel: hallucinatory realism. As you say, this would lead us to read in a different way, based on the intensities that following this story provokes in us. But what's next after this? In what affective mood (or predisposition) does it leave us as readers? I wonder this because the context of pesticides in Argentina has a very strong political charge that hardly appears in the plot. I myself ask myself: does this harm the novel?
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