It’s a psychedelic text, a dialogue between a woman on her deathbed and a boy at her bedside. (The boy’s speeches are italic.) The narrative maintains distance, as in the original title of the book.
Das Unheimliche comes to mind when you read it. The success under the influence of the uncanny atmosphere established here is that the author does not enter into any depiction other than the dialogues of the two characters. It’s like a theater play that starts out of the blue and makes you feel like you’ve been caught.
And there’s an interesting time shift that I’ve never seen before. The present of one of the characters (Carla) is combined with what happened to the other character in the past and spread to the future of that character (Amanda).
And she does it in a very understandable way with the dialogue that goes on. (I imagine Schweblin as a close Cortazar reader, naturally.) The parent will also come across as spooky to the reader.
Schweblin started with a slight ecological catastrophe along with a basic fear of loss and produced a very “trippy” hallucinatory text. Very, very successful.
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