Beautiful, strange. These stories perfectly articulate the feeling of a nightmare. I will certainly read the nest book of Schweblin's that is translated into English.

I didn’t enjoy this one. It just wasn’t for me. It was confusing, disjointed and disturbing. Lots of people love it but I just didn’t get it. Beautiful cover though!

When I read an anthology of short stories, I don’t expect to like all of them, and I did have my favourites in this collection, with titles such as: ‘Headlights’, ‘Mouthful of Birds’ and ‘Preserves’. These, and the rest of the stories in this collection, all start off as being quite ‘normal’, nothing overly startling, but they’re lulling you in to a false sense of security. They are all decidedly quirky, uncomfortable, menacing stories.
I think collections of stories like this are generally better as books that are dipped in and out of, and used as a palate cleanser every now and again. To read them all one after the other doesn’t do them the justice that they deserve.
I am very interested to see where Schweblin goes with her next novel, she has a very interesting imagination!
Many thanks to NetGalley and the publisher, Oneworld Publications, for my copy of this book.

Samanta Schweblin has almost become a household name. Her novella Fever Dreams has been one of the most talked about books in translation in recent years. It won so many awards, including the Shirley Jackson Award (2017), The Tournament of Books (2018), it made the Man Booker International Prize shortlist (2017) and the Warwick Prize for Women in Translation longlist (2017). Needless to say, when it was announced Mouthful of Birds was getting an English translation there was plenty of buzz surrounding it.

I first discovered Samanta Schweblin from the New York Review of Books podcast, they were talking about three Argentinean authors about to take the world by storm, Pola Oloixarac, Mariana Enríquez and Samanta Schweblin. Naturally I had to read the three books that came out around the same time. Random tangent, both Samanta Schweblin and Pola Oloixarac have books out this year, so where is the next Mariana Enríquez? Out of the three it was Fever Dreams that got all the attention, but for me Things We Lost In The Fire was the true highlight.

I feel like the buzz now for Mouthful of Birds is just people projecting their love for Fever Dreams onto it. There is something rugged and unfinished about this collection of short stories that did not sit right with me. I think a truly great short story collection have the stories complements each other and often share an overarching theme. Take Things We Lost In The Fire by Mariana Enríquez (also translated by Megan McDowell) for example. Each story delivers a powerful punch and complement the collection as a whole. Now looking at Mouthful of Birds, it does not have that same feeling, it is just a group of stories anthologised for the purpose of publishing.

I see so many people loving this book and it always seems to be referencing the same stories, like the one with the merman. My opinion is they liked the individual stories they reference but nothing is really said about the complete collection. I know what I like and fairytale retellings and mythological based stories are not for me, so this is the main reason Mouthful of Birds did not work for me. I know short story collections are hard to review as a whole collection, so people point out the stories they love. I prefer to read something where the stories all work together and offer so much more than a good tale.

Mouthful of Birds will serve well for the readers interested in the whole creative process. This is a collection of her earlier short stories. There are fragments of ideas that are being explored in Mouthful of Birds that could blossom into future novels. I see elements of Fever Dreams taking form in this collection and get the feeling this collection was only published because of all the hype surrounding Samanta Schweblin. While this was not the book for me, I know many people will enjoy reading more from Schweblin. I personally recommend picking up Things We Lost In The Fire by Mariana Enríquez instead.

This book was unlike anything I have ever read. This is a book to be savioured, bit by bit. A series of incredible short stories, each one more thought provoking and stranger than the last.
Generally with short story collections some tales are winners and some are losers, but every single story in this collection was a winner.
Mouthful of Birds made me feel nervous, unsettled, challenged, suffocated and anxious.
Granted some of the stories did go over my head and were clearly too hard for my tiny brain to grasp but others I will remember for ever.
But one this all of the stories have in common is every single one of them will make you think.
Reading this book is an experience and one I will never forget.

Like many people, I was fascinated by the surreal atmosphere and ambiguous meaning of Argentinian writer Samanta Schweblin's novel “Fever Dream” when it first appeared in English a couple of years ago. Now a collection of her short fiction has just been published and it's of a similar sinister vibe with odd twists of logic that often veer into near nightmares. Here are stories of children that transform into butterflies, businessmen who are turned into farm hands, a dissatisfied wife who meets an amorous merman and a daughter whose new diet consists solely of consuming living birds. This subject matter could easily feel whimsical if it were written by another author, but Schweblin maintains elements of psychological truth so this fiction continues to feel real even if it's filled with the fantastical. Her stories often feel like puzzles where the meaning is tantalizingly close and I could solve it if I could just work out the intricately constructed design she's skilfully created. But, of course, these stories offer no definitive answers – just glimpses of the inexpressible fears, desires and carnage which simmer just under the surface of our everyday reality.

The way Schweblin approaches common themes from an unlikely angle brings out a new kind of emotional honesty. So subjects such as infidelity, miscarriages, eating disorders, spousal abuse, body image and depression are explored in these stories but in a way which defamiliarises the way we commonly think about them. Although the stories are fantasies they deal with serious issues. For instance, in the story 'Preserves' a woman whose unborn child dies in uterus goes through the process of pregnancy with the support of her family even though they know the child will be stillborn. It shows how the idea of a new child forms so fully in the minds of the family its due to be born into and becomes part of their lives even before its arrival. So the story considers how to deal with feelings of mourning which can arise in this tragic situation common to many families. It's a different kind of magical thinking from what Kit De Waal describes in her novel “The Trick to Time”.

Another story which had a strong resonance for me was the titular tale 'Mouthful of Birds' which describes the perspective of a father whose daughter begins only consuming living birds and refuses to engage in discussions. He's separated from his wife and when the daughter is left in his care he witnesses her deteriorating health because he doesn't want to support her barbaric new diet. In one of the few instances when the daughter speaks she asks if her father loves her and in this moment there is so much unexpressed longing and sorrow as she desperately tries to find a way to control her crumbling family and situation.

The way Schweblin approaches her subject matter feels most poignant when it’s teased out in her longer stories. I felt some of the less successful and least impactful tales were also some of the shorter pieces such as ‘Butterflies’ and 'Rage of Pestilence'. In these it seemed like a central concept was compressed too explicitly into surreal imagery. Some stories also stretch too far into the oblique and become twisted up in a convoluted structure such as 'Olingiris'. Schweblin’s ideas come more alive when they are situated in longer stories such as ‘Headlights’ where brides left on the roadside congregate into a vengeful swarm or 'Heads Against Concrete' where a narrator’s violent impulses, emotional disconnection and racial prejudice are translated into “high” art. Better yet, some of the most eerie tales are where the central object of the story remains entirely unseen and unnamed such as a couple’s desperate attempts to “capture” a child in 'On the Steppe' or a village of vanished children in 'Underground'.

Not all the stories in this book are so outrageously bizarre. Some such as 'Santa Claus Sleeps at our House' and 'The Test' are so deeply ensconced in the narrator’s perspective that reality seems to be shifting around them due to innocence or guilt. Still others movingly capture people’s concealed emotions such as 'The Size of Things' where a rich, successful man steadily regresses while inhabiting a toy shop. Other stories grope at understanding the unknowable emotional condition of others such as a man that suffers from depression in 'My Brother Walter' or the story ‘Irman’ where the death of a man’s wife swiftly leaves him perilously helpless.

Overall I loved getting lost in these tales with their refreshing flavour for the absurd. They brim with a vibrant creativity and I admire the way they offer a warped counter reality to life.

Mouthful of Birds is a collection of translated stories by an Argentinian writer, Samanta Schweblin. The stories are all perfectly well told, and all of them slightly odd, but reading them one after the other can feel somewhat mechanistic.

The stories are (mostly) very short, lack any real framing and pitch straight into a situation that appears normal but turns out to be a bit surreal. Once you know that it's going to have a weird angle, you start to anticipate it and the effect dims. And while the stories are well crafted and lucidly told, it is very difficult to recall anything about them after finishing the book. Even the last story - which you'd think might be the easiest to recall - had me diving back into the text just to remember what it was (it was murder as performance art). I have a recollection of abandoned brides, and a train that never stops, but little else.

On this basis, and without being able to point to anything specific at fault, it feels like a 3-star read.

Even in stories I felt didn't particularly work, Schweblin's imagery is so striking that it haunts after the story is long finished. I still remember scenes from stories that overall didn't grip me or I wasn't sure what to think, but those brief images were very powerful. A good example of this is seen in the eponymous short story 'Mouthful of Birds'. The image - a girl eating live birds - is uncomfortable, unpleasant, and unforgettable, yet the actual plot of the story felt like it could have been expanded. I was left wanting more, especially in terms of characterisation and seeing the relationships within this family. A lot was left unsaid, which I don't normally mind as I like the ambiguity it gives, but here I found myself scratching my head, not knowing what to make of these people or the girl's sudden interest in birds.
Yet when the stories did work, they were brilliant. One of my favourites was 'Heads Against Concrete'' which follows the life of an artist who only paints heads getting hit against concrete. It was such a brilliant and disturbing character study which quietly builds to this terrifying conclusion that I could not stop reading. The narrator is both repulsive and fascinating; creating this sense of unease, of not wanting to follow him down an increasingly darker path yet curiosity compels you forward. Another story I liked was 'The Size of Things' which sees a young man come to live and work in a toy shop. This one feels very different from the others in the collection in that there is a sense of sadness throughout. Is Enrique in this shop because he simply refuses to grow up? Is he trying to relive his childhood? Or did he not have much of a childhood to begin with? The reader is plagued by these questions during the story and it is only when we get to the heart-breaking climax that you realise what has been happening all along.
If you are a fan of Schweblin's Fever Dream you will like this. Despite the narratives here perhaps being more accessible than the dialogue driven, nonlinear plot of the first book, Schweblin's knack for creepy, intense storytelling is on full display here. Her imagery and word choice are stunning, and nothing feels out of place; every word chosen deliberately for maximum impact. However in a couple of stories I did feel like the characterisation and plot were lacking and I struggled to connect with those. Overall however, I did enjoy Mouthful of Birds and will be interested in reading more of Schweblin's work.

These are a literary collection of short stories by Samanta Schweblin translated from the Spanish. They are rather dark fare, infused with horror, stepping onto the territory of the strange, fantastical, the unexpected and even the supernatural with a strong sense of foreboding. As might be expected by such a large number of stories, from the slight to some that have more substance, they prove to be a mixed bag. To my disappointment the style and approach of storytelling fails to vary. So we have a merman, being stranded in a isolated location but not alone, of families, parents and children, brides in search of revenge, endeavours to confess to murder, putting off parenthood until a more timely occasion and more. Make no mistake, these are stories to unsettle, to horrify, to disturb, the queer, the sinister and the visceral. My personal favourites were The Digger, Headlights and Underground. As is often the case with short stories, some stories will hit the mark whilst others are destined to leave no trace on the mind after reading. However, the good stories make these stories from Schweblin worth reading. Many thanks to Oneworld Publications for an ARC.

I had high hopes for this after loving Fever Dream. The collection opens on a strong note with Headlights, where a bride realises she has been abandoned on the side of the road by her new husband for taking too long at a petrol station toilet. She soon realises that she is not the only one, and won’t be the last as a field full of vengeful, jilted brides loom up out of the darkness to take their revenge. Meanwhile inThe Heavy Suitcase, a man’s attempts to own up to the murder of his wife lead him to be inexplicably hailed as a modern art phenomenon in a story reminiscent of Tales of the Unexpected.
The collection is strong when exploring the relationship between parents and children. In the hallucinatory Preserves, a couple who feel unprepared for parenthood, reverse a pregnancy while preserving their daughter for a time when they feel ready. The title story is a complex, unexpected look at family dynamics as a divorced mother and father come to terms with the fact that their thirteen-year old daughter can only thrive by eating live birds.
In Underground, all the children in a town begin to dig a hole together to the delight of their parents – though that delight will soon turn to horror. These stories successfully ask questions about what it means to be a good parent and how far we will go to nourish and protect our offspring.
Anxiety over life changes is also trenchantly explored. In one of the collection’s more successful stories Toward Happy Civilisation, an office worker without the correct change for a train finds himself held captive in the countryside by the station master and his wife. When escape finally comes, it appears that it might not have been what he wanted after all. In The Size of Things, a traumatised man finds succour volunteering in a local toy shop, turning the business around until he eventually physically becomes a child again.
Time and again we are presented with seemingly understandable scenarios that slowly become darker and more complex. In Digger, a man rents a holiday home only to find a strange man digging a giant hole in the driveway, while in Irman, a pit stop at a roadside café ends in death and robbery.
Although most of the stories here explore the boundary between what is strange and what is familiar through eerie plot twists and dark humour, the collection as a whole didn’t really work for me. Nearly all are written in a very similar impassive style and lack a depth of character, which may be a stylistic choice but left me wanting more. All characters approach the bizarre circumstances they find themselves in with a sense of apathy and acceptance that robs many of the stories of drama or effectiveness.
Some seem to be odd just for the sake of it, such as The Merman, featuring – yes, a flirtatious merman, or Slowing Down which charts the uninspiring death of a human cannonball and the similarity of mood and technique throughout the collection dilutes a lot of its power.
There are some real stand out stories here, but there are a lot, and many become indistinguishable from each other due to the lack of definition or individual style. It’s a shame, because when they work, the stories are eerie and unsettling, but when they don’t, they are forgettable.
Megan McDowell has however, done an excellent job with the translation and has a clear understanding of the underlying tone of menace that runs through the collection.

Stories that begin in medias res and provide little exposition. Elements of horror and surrealism - a girl who eats birds, an army of jilted brides - mix with odd narratives of childhood - a Christmas when Santa came to stay is remembered; however, Santa turns out to be the narrator's mother's lover. The stories lack beginnings, middles, and ends, which many will find dissatisfying. The stories' common deadpan style and lack of depth (flat characters, no background, little in the way of story) will be lauded by some as 'daring' or 'sophisticated'; alternatively it might be viewed as juvenile and lazy. Borges comparisons will abound for no better reasons than that the stories take flight from conventional realism and the author is Argentinian; beyond unsubtle employment of dramatic irony in 'Santa Claus Sleeps at Our House', the stories lack the generosity, humour, and playfulness commonly associated with Borges.

I loved the nightmarish unreality of Fever Dream. Schweblin’s writing perfectly captured the horror of the hallucinogenic state, when the senses cannot be trusted and everyday rules seem to reformulate in disturbing ways.

This technique is replicated in many of the stories in Mouthful of Birds but to far less effect. The unexpected penetration of the nightmarish and unearthly into the everyday is a feature of each. The reaction; or rather the lack of reaction from the characters and their prosaic acceptance of the disturbing things happening around them is reminiscent of the logic that allows anything to be acceptable within a dream. But after a while this sense of apathy, instead of inducing unease, bleeds over to the reader so that the stories pass through you without leaving a mark.
The waning of the writing’s power is partly because it creates a mood so similar across the different stories that they become largely indistinguishable and difficult to judge on their individual merits. The characters and their internal narratives are noticeably similar and failed to define them as separate entities.

Ultimately, there is a surprising lack of range that becomes clears as you read through the stories. Each uses similar techniques to create a momentary chill and disturbance but the repetition blunts the effect and makes the collection disappointingly unmemorable.

Carrying on from Fever Dream, Schweblin’s latest collection is filled with stories generating a sharp sense of dread– or are just downright nightmarishly absurd in some cases.

As is the case with most collections, some stories were stronger than others. I thought Underground and Mouthful of Birds were the jewels in the crown here. Perfect winter read.

This was a ARC from Netgalley and Oneworld in exchange for an honest review.

Samanta Schweblin's 2014 first novel Distancia de rescate, when translated into English as Fever Dream by the wonderful Megan McDowell, was one of my books of 2017, and my pick of the Man Booker International longlist. Powerful, unsettling, gripping, a book that genuinely disturbed my dreams.

Translated again by McDowell, Mouthful of Birds: Stories was, per the copyright page 'originally published, in Spanish and in somewhat different form, as Pájaros en la boca by Random House Mondadori, 2010', and hence an earlier work originally.

The book consists of 20 short stories, averaging 12 pages each, although varying in length.

Fever Dream was successfully pitched in what the literary critic Tzvetan Todorov calls in his Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre "the fantastic." He argues that an author can choose between a rational explanation for supernatural events - what Todorov calls "the uncanny" - and a supernatural explanation - what he calls the "marvellous" (and most would call fantasy). Todorov focuses on the difficult to occupy middle ground:

"The fantastic occupies the duration of this uncertainty. Once we choose one answer or the other, we leave the fantastic for a neighbouring genre, the uncanny or the marvellous. The fantastic is that hesitation experienced by a person who knows only the laws of nature, confronting an apparently supernatural event.
...
The fantastic requires the fulfillment of three conditions. First, the text must oblige the reader to consider the world of the characters as a world of living persons and to hesitate between a natural or supernatural explanation of the events described. Second, this hesitation may also be experienced by a character; thus the reader's role is so to speak entrusted to a character, and at the same time the hesitation is represented, it becomes one of the themes of the work - in the case of naive reading, the actual reader identifies himself with the character. Third, the reader must adopt a certain attitude with regard to the text: he will reject allegorical as well as "poetic" interpretations."

The stories in Mouthful of Birds occupy similar territory, although the emphasis is a little less on supernatural elements, and more on strange situations and behaviour.

The opening story Headlights starts with Felicity standing at the side of the road, watching taillights recede into the distance:

"In the flat darkness of the countryside, there is only disappointment, a wedding dress, and a bathroom she shouldn’t have taken so long in."

Just married, she stopped for a toilet break, only to find, when she had finished at her new husband had, without any warning, driven off without her.

And then she meets Nené, and finds that she is not the only one, indeed there are many women in this particular rest place in the same situation, some of whom have been waiting for years:

"“Look,” says Nené, “I’ll make this short because there’s really not much to it.” She steps on the cigarette, emphasizing the words: “They get tired of waiting and they leave you. It seems waiting wears them out.” Felicity carefully follows the movement of a new cigarette toward the woman’s mouth, the smoke that blends with the darkness, the lips that press the cigarette. “So the girls cry and wait for them . . .” Nené goes on , “and they wait . . ."

But one day a car stops and the husband instead of the wife gets out for the toilet. Felicity and Nené decide to take action, only to find that the horizon is suddenly filled with headlights ...

Preserves begins:

"A week passes, a month, and we gradually start accepting that Teresita will be here ahead of all our plans."

The female narrator finds that her pregnancy is progressing faster than she and her husband had planned for - 'he had nothing against our little Teresita - what could he have against her? It's just that there was so much to do before she came.'

Until, that is, they find a doctor who claims to be able to reverse the pregnancy, starting with a treatment that involves her husband coming home late and being inattentive, her mother in law taking back the various gifts she had given them to get ready for Teresita ...

The title story is narrated by a man whose 13 year-old daughter is living with her mother, after their divorce. One day the mother sends the girl to live with him, unable to cope with the girl's new diet, which involves eating live birds. At first he tries to rationalise it to himself:

'I thought about how, considering there are people who eat people, eating live birds wasn’t so bad. Also, from a natural point of view it was healthier than drugs, and from a social one, it was easier to hide than a pregnancy at thirteen. But I’m pretty sure that until I reached for the car-door handle I went on thinking, She eats birds, she eats birds, she eats birds, on and on.'

But as he has to take responsibility for her diet: 'I left early for work and endured the hours searching the internet for infinite combinations of words like bird, raw, cure, adoption,..'

Another story, with similarities to Headlights has businessman stranded in a remote location when he is unable to find the change for a train ticket, the stationmaster telling him that he also has no change, and signalling to the train going to the capital city that it needn't stop at the station. It seems a relatively trivial incident until it becomes clear that the stationmaster never lets the train stop and he is not the only stranded passenger:

'He has the notion that the dogs of the world are the result of men who have failed in their attempted journeys. Men nourished and retained with nothing but steaming broth, men whose hair grows long and whose ears droop and whose tails lengthen, a feeling of terror and cold inciting them to stay silent, curled up under some trainstation bench, contemplating the failures of the newcomer who is just like them only still has hope, staunchly awaiting the opportunity of a voyage.'

Then one day he and his fellows manage to trick a train into stopping, only for things not to turn out as they planned ...

Overall, not as powerful as Fever Dream, and while there were very few duds in the collection, there were few absolute standouts either, indeed the collection, for better or worse, did seem to be Schweblin reworking a consistent theme. But still highly worthwhile and a 2019 Man Booker International contender. A solid 4 stars.

Thanks to the publisher, via Netgalley, for the ARC.