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Samanta Schweblin: Distancia de rescate (Fever Dream )

Before we get into the plot of this novel, there are a couple of issues to mention first. The first issue, and one that is key to this book is the excessive use of pesticides in Argentina. You can read more in this article, though, there have been many other reports on the issue. The pesticides get washed off the fields into the water courses and poison streams, lakes and so on as well as getting into drinking water used by both humans and animals. Thre are parts of Argentina do not have drinking water and take their water from water courses. The result of this, of course is both humans and animals are poisoned, both get ill and there are also many instances of birth defects, again both humans and animals, as we shall see in this book.

You may have noticed that the Spanish title of this book isDistancia de rescate. This literally means. rescue distance and is used in this book to mean how far a mother can let her child go while she can still reach the child if anything untoward should happen.

The book starts with Amanda, mother of Nina, wwho are staying in the region on holiday. They meet Carla, mother of David.

Carla tells Amanda her story, specifically about David. Her husband, Omar, breeds horses. He has borrowed a horse, a male, to breed with his female horses. One day when he is away, Carla notices at the horse is not where it should be. She picks up David and runs out to look for the horse. She eventually sees him in a stream drinking water. She places David down and goes after the horse trying to coax it back. She eventually succeeds but in the meantime David seems to have got into the stream and he clearly swallowed some of the water.The horse dies, and David is clearly very ill.

She hurries to the Green House, a nearby house where a woman lives who is good at treating various ailments. She is known only as The Woman in the Green House. She has seven sons who live in a neighbouring house and look after her but do not enter her house. She tells Carla that David will die if he is not treated. There is only one solution. – the transmigration of spirits. This means part of David’s spirit transfers to someone else and part of their spirit transfers to David by reducing the effect of the poison and saving both. Neither Carla nor we be fully understand this but it is carried out and the David is saved. However, Carla now refers to David as a monster.

Soon after Amanda arrive Amanda leaves Nina to sleep and goes out briefly. She meets Carla and Carla points out that David has got into her house. She does not believe this, but when she looks at the window, she sees both David and Nina. The windows had been left open and the door unlocked but now the windows are closed and the door is locked. Amanda, all followed by Carla is able to enter the house with her key but both David and Nina are behaving in a distinctly strange way. She decides that it is perhaps time to leave.

Things get stranger when she gets up in the middle of the night finds Nina not in her bed, but, instead downstairs in the kitchen with her father Amanda’s husband who was not expected till the weekend. Nina is again behaving strangely and soon after they pack up and set out. On the way she decides to stop by Carla’s place of work, a farm.

Nina sits in the grass , which is wet and Amanda soon discovers that the wetness witness is not dew as it smells. What is even more peculiar is that Amanda and David seem to be holding a conversation in Amanda’s head and David is warning Amanda about the effect on Nina sitting on the grass that she needs to act quickly t to save Nina.

But the discussion with David, the realisation by both Carla and Amanda that something is wrong with Amanda and Nina results in them being taken to the emergency room where the seemingly inept nurse puts it all down to too much sun and gives them an appropriate pill. But we know, Carla and Amanda know and the nurse should know as she has a son with his condition at that the problem is very much worse.

While this book is very much about a key environmental issue, namely agricultural run-off, particularly from pesticides, getting into the drinking water for both humans and animals it could have been told as a fairly conventional story but Schweblin has elected to use a technique which is similar to horror as we get a gradual awareness of not only that David is a monster but seeing some of the monstrous things he has done and at the same time we see him and particularly hear him inside Amanda’s head, talking to her and sometimes warning her. We see various other mothers with deformed children and clearly for them and Carla it must be devastating that we do not see any evidence of anyone doing anything about it. It is a relatively short book and well worth reading both for the subject matter and for the author’s excellent way of conveying the horror of her subject.

Publishing history

First published by in 2014 Penguin Random House
First English translation by Oneworld /Riverhead in 2017
Translated by Megan McDowell