Review: 'Seven Empty Houses: Stories' by Samanta Schweblin, trans. Megan McDowell

I think I first read about Samanta Schweblin on the always-brilliant LitHub. At their recommendation I read Mouthful of Birds, a short story collection by Schweblin which absolutely blew me away. Quickly afterwards I read Fever Dream, which fully lived up to its name. Since then I've been looking for more short stories by Schweblin to read, saving her novels for a rainy day. Thankfully now her first collection is available in English! Thanks to Oneworld Publications and NetGalley for providing me with a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

Pub. Date: 11/3/2022
Publisher: Oneworld Publications

The collection that established Samanta Schweblin at the forefront of her literary generation, available in English for the first time

The seven houses in these seven stories are strange. A person is missing, or a truth, or memory; some rooms are enticing, some unmoored, others empty. But in Samanta Schweblin’s tense, visionary tales, something always creeps back in: a ghost, a fight, trespassers, a list of things to do before you die, or the fallibility of parents.

Seven Empty Houses offers an entry point into a fiercely original mind, and a slingshot into Schweblin’s destabilizing, exhilarating literary world. In each story, the twists and turns will unnerve and surprise: Schweblin never takes the expected path and instead digs under the skin and reveals uncomfortable truths about our sense of home, of belonging, and of the fragility of our connections with others. This is a masterwork from one of our most brilliant modern writers.

Schweblin has an incredibly talent for writing stories that are utterly disconcerting and uncanny. The stories in Seven Empty Houses are all about real life, about the real connections between people, about things that can happen in real life. And yet... there is something off in each of these stories. It's not always easy to put your finger on exactly what, however, and I think that is where the magic of Schweblin's writing lies for me. Because that is also real life. Sometimes something is just off, not right. Sometimes a relationship has taken a weird turn and you can't quite say what it was that made it go sour. Sometimes something someone says will stick in your throat and you won't really know why it has hit you that way. The stories in Seven Empty Houses are all marked by these kind of real-life relationships, memories, moments, hardships which can both forge real connections or absolutely shatter reality. They reveal the cruelty we contain within ourselves, but also our ability to be kind and understanding and warm. 

Seven Empty Houses is made up of seven great stories. 'None of That' is a great opener as it drops the reader right into a complicated mother-daughter relationship. Why does the mother insist on driving through these neighbourhoods? Why is she sneaking into other people's houses? And what does the daughter do about it? 'My Parents and My Children' continues to play on this unease with parental relationships, as a father searches for his children and his parents with his soon-to-be ex-wife. It is the childish and senior innocence in contrast to the mature sadness here that got me. 'It Happens All the Time in This House' was the story that struck me from the beginning, dealing with loss and sadness and a search for connection despite it all. It advocates strongly for empathy in the face of denial. 'Breath from the Depths' is the longest story in the collection and tracks an elderly woman's decline into a kind of paranoid senility. She is unsure and suspicious of everything, unwilling to face certain truths and unable to see past her own lies. Because of its length this story can go a lot deeper than the others and I found myself absolutely fascinated by it. 

'Two Square Feet' asks a question I think every woman has asked herself. How much space do I really take up? What is really mine? Who and what am I, in this world? 'An Unlucky Man' is perhaps the trickiest of the stories in this collection. A girl remembers her 8th birthday on which her attention-seeking sister gets rushed to the hospital, where the birthday girl is potentially exposed to a predator or entertained by an unlucky man. The last story, 'Out', shows a woman desperate to get out of her and her husband's apartment, out of the conversation they're having. She is so desperate, in fact, she leaves while wrapped in a bathrobe and gets into a stranger's car. This story is a little less focused, I feel, than the others, but full of fascinating ideas. 

I continue to be in love with Samanta Schweblin's writing, guided carefully by Megan McDowell. Originally published in 2015 as Sieta casa vacias, this is Schweblin's first short story collection. It is odd, in a way, to get a glance at an author's "beginnings" after you've gotten to know them through their more "mature" works. Much of what I loved about Schweblin's Moutful of Birds and Fever Dreams is already here, but you can also see that some of it is still germinating. Some of the stories are not quite as sharp or precise as you know Schweblin can be, while each already carries that familiar atmosphere. While Moutful of Birds and Fever Dream moved more actively in the Magical Realism or Horror genres, playing with their willingness to blur the boundaries between the real and imagined, the stories in Seven Empty Houses are all solidly earth-bound. These stories are developing that sense of unease Schweblin deploys so successfully, while still rooted in reality. While of course I don't know what the Spanish is like, I must say that Megan McDowell once again brilliantly translates Schweblin's prose. The word choice is utterly precise which, oddly enough, allows for that distinct sense of wrongness to shine through. 

I give this collection...

4 Universes!

Seven Empty Houses is a fascinating collection of stories about loss, relationships, and uncertainty. Each draws a different portrait, yet each story is also thematically tied to the rest. Samanta Schweblin continues to be one of the most exciting contemporary authors I have the honour to read.