Samanta Schweblin

GRANTA 113: THE BEST OF YOUNG SPANISH-LANGUAGE NOVELISTS

I first read Samanta Schweblin last year in Lima, when a friend gave me the Peruvian edition of Pájaros en la boca, her second story collection. I’d heard her name before, but never had the chance to read her work. I was floored. It was one of those revelatory reading experiences one has now and again: hers was a completely unique voice, startling, funny, confident, a voice I trusted completely, even when the stories took me places I didn’t recognize, and never would have expected to go. Samanta’s stories are daring, have a disconcerting beauty to them. Like a poet, she trafficks in images: in the title story, the child of a broken family acts out by swallowing birds; in ‘The Digger’, one man’s vacation is disrupted by the unexplained presence of another man, with a shovel, intent on digging a hole. Why?

It wouldn’t be accurate to say it doesn’t matter why – but, as is often the case in Samanta’s stories, what we know is less important than the mood created by what we don’t. She trusts the shadows she creates. One of my favourite stories from Pájaros en la boca is ‘My brother Walter’, a wry portrait of a family’s rather conventional economic rise, orbiting the inscrutable figure of Walter, whose deepening depression has a sort of talismanic quality for those around him. The family keeps him nearby, but no one really wonders why he can’t share in the good times. They’d rather not know. We, the readers, don’t know either, at least not exactly, but Samanta’s spare, precise prose makes Walter’s pain clear enough, and the family’s indifference all too hurtful. The result, like much of Samanta’s work, is painful, funny, and unsettling. It’s a real honour to translate Samanta Schweblin into English, and I hope to see more published soon. – Daniel Alarcón, Best Young American Novelist 2007

Each of the Best of Young Spanish-Language Novelists answered a questionnaire on their influences and the role of the writer in public life. Here are Schweblin’s answers:

Name the five writers you most admire at the moment (any period, language or genre).

Franz Kafka, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Flannery O’Connor, John Cheever and J. D. Salinger

Have you published literary criticism?

No, and it’s something that I’d never do.

Which languages do you read in?

Spanish and English

Do you have your own web page?

www.samantaschweblin.com

Is your fiction your sole source of income? If not, what else do you live off?

My income from writing isn’t enough yet. I live off teaching, but until recently I worked for many years in the fields of design and corporate image consultancy for businesses and institutions (a diversion from my original career, cinema).

Should writers play a role in public life beyond the publication of their work? If so, in what way?

They should, of course. Not through their status as writers, but as ‘civilians’. The writer’s voice is as necessary as that of the doctor or the shoemaker.

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