Fever Dream by Samantha Schweblin

"I sat there looking at his dirty hands. He was using them to hold on to the table like a railing as he walked, and then I saw his wrists. He had marks on his skin, lines like bracelets around his wrists, and a little above them, too, maybe left by the rope. 'It seems cruel,' said the woman as she approached, watching my reaction and David's next step, 'but we have to make sure that only the spirit leaves.' She caressed his wrists, and as if forgiving herself she said, 'The body has to stay.'"

All of Samantha Schweblin's short novel Fever Dream is a conversation between two people: Amanda, a woman who is dying in a rural Argentinian clinic, and David, a little boy. David is the son--sort of--of a local woman named Carla; Amanda was visiting their small town with her daughter Nina when she took sick. Together, Amanda and David piece together a hazy account of the events that led up to Amanda's hospitalization. David, understanding that Amanda doesn't have much time, keeps telling her that some things are not important, but she labors over every bit of the story, trying desperately to figure out what led her here, and what happened to her daughter.

What kind of story is this going to be? The strange interlocutory form--the mix of things they know for certain and things they do not understand--gives a surreal quality to the story that reflects the "fever dream" of the title. Amanda recounts to David the disturbing story she heard from David's mother, Carla: as a boy, David drank from a poisoned stream that killed the family's prized horse. Understanding that David too, would get sick, Carla took him to a healer who gave David only one option to live: his spirit would travel to another body, and thus be saved, but another spirit would enter. Desperate for David to live, Carla accedes, but the David that returns from the ritual is strange: his skin covered in spots, his diction become strangely formal, and having developed a peculiar intuition and empathy for the many dying animals around their home. Carla tells Amanda that she has come to fear her unheimlich son, or ward, or whatever he is.

The truth, or a truth unfolds over the course of Amanda and David's conversation: what has transformed David is not the soul ritual but the toxic chemical that has leached into the grass. The small town is centered on a vague refinery or chemical plant known as "Sotomayor's," which is responsible for the poisoning. It's the chemicals that have put Amanda in the hospital, and which may be affecting Nina--who, in the novel's most intense moment, may be subjected to the same desperate ritual as David.

What sets Fever Dream apart is how carefully it controls the release of information; only slowly does Schweblin reveal that it's a novel about ecological collapse. In fact, it reminded me of nothing more clearly than Joy Williams' new novel Harrow, another book that seeks out new forms that might do justice to the magnitude of the world's crisis (right down to the horse!). Here, sober realities are mixed with ritual myths and surrealism. Among other things, it reveals the way that ecological collapse creates generational divides, and captures the utter fear and panic that brings some people to decide it's immoral to bring children into the 21st century world. Throughout it, David's refrain--None of this is important, we're wasting time--begins to feel like a call to pay closer attention to the things that really matter.