Celebrated Argentinian author Samanta Schweblin and translator Megan McDowell, who co-won the 2022 National Book Award for Translated Literature for Seven Empty Houses, reunite for their fifth collaboration, Good and Evil and Other Stories, a stupendous six-story collection. Despite the seemingly simple title, little of Schweblin's fiction is ever quite straightforward; her perplexingly peculiar, uncannily startling narratives are poised to delight and challenge.
Complicated, strained relationships between family members repeat and resonate here. In "An Eye in the Throat," a young child loses his voice (and almost his life) after swallowing a battery, but his father is the one who loses his ability to communicate his stifling guilt and desperate love for his son. In "A Woman from Atlántida," a hairdresser gently washes the disheveled hair of an unkempt elderly woman who visits the salon every two weeks; 40 years have passed since they originally met, and the old woman remains the only link to the hairdresser's older sister. In "A Visit from the Chief," a woman frequents her mother's care home, but rarely her difficult mother; on one occasion, she notices a facility resident at the subway station who's managed to leave undetected and the woman decides to take her home, with shocking, terrifying results.
When Schweblin adds animals to her narratives, inexplicable and mystical events occur. In "Welcome to the Club," a woman struggles between her life with a husband and two daughters (and a borrowed, escape-prone rabbit) and the lure of the mossy bottom of the nearby open water. In "A Fabulous Animal," a woman receives a call from an estranged friend who, after 20 years without contact, needs to talk about her son's death witnessed by both women; as the friend announces she's dying, the woman reveals the child's final, equine wish. In "William in the Window," a Shanghai writers' residency gathers an internationally diverse group of 10 authors; when they congregate one evening for the Irish writer's birthday, they also share in the news of the death of her cat.
Schweblin (Mouthful of Birds) again demonstrates her irrefutable mastery for arousing unease, always eschewing easy labels or judgments. Her ending "Notes on the Stories" is a delicious enhancement. To bestow "good" or "evil" verdicts on any of her characters--or their unsettling situations--is a purposefully impossible task, a dazzling reminder that the gray areas of in-between are where realities exist. --Terry Hong
Shelf Talker: Samanta Schweblin's wondrous six-story collection, Good and Evil and Other Stories, evades simplicity to reveal intricately complicated relationships.