Born in Buenos Aires in 1978 and residing in Berlin since 2012, Samanta Schweblin is one of Latin America’s emerging literary voices. She has authored four collections of short stories and two novels, all characterized by constant tension, latent violence, and a sort of psychological terror that elicits discomfort and unease in the reader.
The author attended the Fólio Festival in Óbidos to participate in a session regarding her latest collection of stories, ‘O bom mal,’ published this year in Portugal.
In line with her previous works, these stories also reinvent the concept of normality, allowing the strange and bizarre to appear as normal.
“Normality is a social, political, and economic construct linked to power and serves to exclude what is different, making us believe there is a correct way to live, feel, and exist in the world,” the author stated in an interview while in Lisbon.
Samanta Schweblin explores the uncanny in the everyday, creating suspense from seemingly normal situations, such as the scenario in one of “O bom mal” stories, where an unexpected visitor settles into a woman’s home and refuses to leave.
“We try to live in normality out of fear of losing control, so anything that slightly deviates from those parameters is considered abnormal, yet what we deem normal can, in fact, be strange or conceal a detail that disrupts daily life. Similarly, what is conventionally seen as abnormal might be more natural than we think. I enjoy crossing those barriers.”
One of the tools the writer uses to cross these barriers and challenge the perceptions of “normality” is her fascination with fear and the narrative tension she can create.
“I put my fears and anxieties on paper, seeking to connect with others and find answers for myself. I start with something that unsettles me, something I don’t understand, and write to try to comprehend, to discover why it disturbs me. For instance, I am happy but also unhappy, and I wonder if everyone feels like that, if they experience the same as I do. These are questions that are impossible to answer because we can never truly know how someone else feels. If we could, perhaps we’d feel less alone,” she explains.
Similarly, fear demands the reader’s full attention, and the writer seeks to create a tension that deeply involves the reader because that is also what she seeks as a reader.
Samanta Schweblin starts from reality and introduces a small distortion that is enough to make everything unsettling. Her stories maintain an apparent normality—a family, a couple, a house, a journey—that discreetly fragments, revealing something strange, absurd, or sinister, and from there, it becomes impossible to know what is normal.
The house, in particular, holds special significance for her as several of her stories are set in that space. Samanta Schweblin explored domestic suspense and psychological imbalance in a disturbing collection of stories titled ‘Sete casas vazias,’ where this “safe place” becomes dangerous or frightening.
“Eighty percent of femicides in Latin America happen within the home. The house is a part of us, a part of our body. We are one body when we go out—to the street, with friends, to work—and another when we are at home, in our room, in the bathroom, in the garage. We may be more secure and comfortable, but also more vulnerable, and I like to explore that.”
This tension she establishes is part of a dialogue she maintains with the reader, provoking an emotional and intellectual response, as she sees literature as a two-person event.
“A book by itself is lifeless, it’s an object. It needs a reader to open it and release that world of fiction, to understand and feel it in their own way. Only then does it come to life. I believe that a book only exists when there is a writer and a reader. It’s a dance for two. I don’t like to dance alone.”
The author also emphasizes the writer’s role as a “mediator” between the fiction they write and the reader, always mindful of managing emotions and feelings, manipulating the reader’s tension to keep them hooked until the end.
“I have to calm myself, not get too carried away and give everything away immediately. The reader finishes the story with me; I leave spaces of silence and mystery so they can participate. If I explain everything, the text dies.”
The book ‘O bom mal’ began as a story with that name, but when she realized that “everything can be both good and bad,” Schweblin expanded the theme to the entire book and titled it as such.
In the writer’s view, there is an open dialogue between good and evil, even in the stories told about these concepts, but her stories explore forces that challenge the predictability of daily life and the ability to control what we cherish most, exposing the fragility of absolute good and evil.
“Sometimes we do bad things that end up having a good outcome, perhaps even better than the previous situation. Similarly, when we try to do good, for example, educate our children well, carefully, with balance, we sometimes end up doing harm, creating careless or unbalanced individuals,” she said.
Samanta Schweblin is part of a generation of young Latin American women writers who broke away from the ‘boom’ of magical realism and established themselves with a different narrative style, closer to the fantastic and the disturbing, but she rejects the notion of a “trend.”
The author explains that this generation emerged from a movement of women who “broke with the empire of male authors,” realizing that “literature written by women is the other half of humanity’s literature that had been sidelined for a long time.”
“At some point, we realized we were only reading male authors and started looking for female authors. Of course, what matters is reading good authors, whether men or women, but in the search for these hidden female authors, we discovered many excellent writers. So, the space they conquered was not because they are women, but because they have wonderful quality.”
“And this movement of breaking away, of breaking with a society anchored in men, is very important, particularly in the times we live in, with the rise of the far-right everywhere, with feminism being challenged and attempts to dismantle these achievements, when there is still so much to be done: even today, Latin America continues to have one of the highest rates of femicide in the world,” she added.
The writer revealed she is currently working on a collection of stories—”I’m always writing stories”—and a novel, and will publish whichever is ready first.
Regarding the literary genre in which she feels most comfortable, she claims to have no preference but laments that short stories are generally seen as a lesser style, associated with fables or children’s stories.
“A short story is like a portal; it allows you to enter another world, fantastic. This also happens in novels, but it involves more depth, while in short stories, it’s quicker and much more intense,” she stated.
In addition to the stories ‘O bom mal’ and ‘Sete casas vazias,’ Samanta Schweblin has also published in Portugal the collection ‘Pássaros na boca’ and the novels ‘Distância de segurança’ and ‘Kentukis,’ all published by Elsinore.
