Mouthful of Birds
Samanta Schweblin
Penguin Random House, 2019
Review by Alexandra Valahu
Sometimes, when you wake up from a vivid dream, a feeling or an emotion lingers on, even though you can’t remember the particular details and edges of what happened. In a conversation with Valeria Luiselli for Louisiana Channel, Argentine author Samanta Schweblin explains that when she writes prose, “It’s about having a particular feeling or a drive…It has to do with something emotional.” “There is this mood that I want to arrive at,” she says. This emotional space she wants to arrive at, in all its iterations, permeates the writing in her latest collection of twenty short stories, Mouthful of Birds (originally Pájaros en la boca).
Both this recent collection and Schweblin’s short and chilling novel Fever Dream (Distancia de rescate) were translated from Spanish by Megan McDowell.
Something that characterized Schweblin’s writing in Fever Dream, and which is true for Mouthful of Birds as well, is that the plot lines and character development are mostly secondary to whatever strange idea or mood pulses through the stories. McDowell masterfully translates Schweblin’s Spanish into exact and well-paced sentences that at times revolve around a single telling word. What makes these stories so eerie is their uncanny realism. They are filled with objects that exist in the world as we perceive it, but something is always just a little off. A man colour coordinates the items in a toy store. Another needs help handling a heavy suitcase. One digs holes in the earth behind a big house. A woman suffering from depression waits for Santa Claus in front of the TV.
Characters frequently bemoan their current situations and wish to wake up to an ordinary day, but they are never able to. They are stuck in fields, and by train tracks, in situations they desperately want to change and in realities that refuse to remold themselves to their liking. The true feeling of dread that seeps into the reader’s reality is not rooted in the images of someone eating birds or of a corpse in a suitcase as performance art, but in the idea that characters are always stuck somewhere.
Schweblin’s scariest stories in the collection work precisely because she does not seek to shock the reader with gore or with superfluous surprise but with a perfectly-cadenced pace that carries a creeping tension. In one of the best stories, “Toward Happy Civilization”, a man is stuck in the countryside without the exact change he needs to purchase a train ticket. Every day, the ticket man signals to the train that there are no passengers. Every day, the cycle begins anew and the man wonders if he will ever get back to the capital.
Schweblin’s language is precise (in the original Spanish, and in the translation); succinct sentences lend a matter-of-factness to character’s conversations. Reading the stories in Spanish, I wondered how one translates a feeling that isn’t explicitly stated in the text. How can a translator fill the negative space in the stories with an emotion that transcends language? Something is certainly lost in translation and there’s sometimes a different rhythmic and more poetic style in the Spanish text than in English. However, while there are things a translation can never do, Megan McDowell succeeds in translating a feeling of unsettlement. She is able to express in English the emotion present in the Spanish text and has achieved one of the closest and most precise translations I’ve ever read.
These are stories concerned with and filled with tension. Internal tensions as characters face their predicaments, tensions between the strangeness of an object or a feeling in an otherwise real setting, and tensions between parents and their children. In the title story, “Mouthful of Birds”, a teenage girl eats live, warm birds and begins to visibly thrive from this consumption habit. Later, as the knotted tension untangles itself, her father says “You eat live birds, Sara”, and wonders to himself “what it would be like to have a mouth full of something all feathers and feet, to swallow something warm and moving.”
In “On the Steppe”, we’re confronted with a couple who goes out every night to hunt for something unnamed that they are never able to catch. One day, the husband comes home and cheerfully announces that he has found another couple like them: “They came here for the same reason […] And they have one. They’ve had him a month now.”
Throughout the collection, there’s a recurrence of car rides, train rides, and highway settings, but no one actually arrives anywhere. Characters are stuck on the road, or alongside it. Many of the stories are set in bare countryside landscapes that feel both inescapable and isolated. Less stifled by busy settings, the stories leave more room for a strange feeling to intensify and take over the reader. In the opening story “Headlights”, a newly-wed woman is left on the side of the highway at a gas station. Abandoned and in shock, she follows another woman to a nearby field. There, she hears hundreds of women sobbing, crying out for the husbands that left them behind because they got tired of waiting.
Unexpectedly, some of these unsettling stories are quite funny, especially when Schweblin focuses on the relationships between parents and their children. A woman isn’t ready to have her baby and reverses her pregnancy through conscious breathing and energy shifting in “Preserves”. By the final paragraph, her stomach has dwindled so much that she spits out her now shrunken, almond-sized baby and places it in a jar, for later.
Mouthful of Birds is full of stories that widen the reader’s perception of reality and contort the edges of what’s real. They make you feel submitted to a version of reality that resembles a dream; an almost realistic series of images with an object or two that don’t seem to be in place. With Schweblin’s writing in mind, perhaps next time we go out, our version of the real won’t look the same as it did. We will find it replaced with an uncanny and widened reality.
Alexandra Valahu is a writer, radio producer, and translator, usually based in Vancouver, BC. Her writing has also been published on rabble.ca.”