Schweblin is one of my favourite writers (with the incredible help of Megan McDowall for us English language readers). I’ve read all of her work currently translated and I have to say, I prefer her longer form stuff. There were a couple of really great stories in here (Breath From the Depths & Out) and whilst the other stories weren’t bad, I just didn’t always feel satisfied by them. I love ambiguity in fiction normally but something didn’t quite click with me here.

À fantastic, unsettling collection of stories from the author of Fever Dream. I wasn't too hot on Schweblin's previous collection, A Mouthful Of Birds, but this blew my expectations away.

Having found Samanta Schweblin’s <i>Mouthful of Birds </i>to make for a relatively disturbing collection of short stories I was intrigued to read more by her. <i>Seven Empty Houses</i> even promised a thematic unity in its seven stories, as they all featured strange houses. Sadly I found the motif to be explored/utilized in a rather underwhelming way, and none of the stories really stood out to me. Sure, they are all characterized by that quiet ominous vibe that seems to be very much on brand for Schweblin, and I do think that some of the stories did present us with some effectively unsettling imagery, but the atmosphere was just lacking. There was an air of surreality, sure, but it ultimately lacked ‘oomph’ (they were very samey). Compared to the stories from <i>Mouthful of Birds </i>, the stories in this collection are kind of predictable. We have missing people, ghosts, other 'disturbances', a blurring of the real and the imagined…but these never add up to create a genuinely disturbing or otherwise memorable tale.

This is a wonderfully fun and off-the-wall collection of stories, where danger and absurdity hide around the corner from the mundane and fun. Various house hide secrets, but also shield the smallest banalities of life.

I had not read any other books of Schwelin's before this, but I was immediately drawn into her world(s) and the immediacy of her writing.

I received an advanced copy of this book from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

I think I first read about Samanta Schweblin on the always-brilliant LitHub. At their recommendation I read Mouthful of Birds, a short story collection by Schweblin which absolutely blew me away. Quickly afterwards I read Fever Dream, which fully lived up to its name. Since then I've been looking for more short stories by Schweblin to read, saving her novels for a rainy day. Thankfully now her first collection is available in English! Thanks to Oneworld Publications and NetGalley for providing me with a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

Schweblin has an incredibly talent for writing stories that are utterly disconcerting and uncanny. The stories in Seven Empty Houses are all about real life, about the real connections between people, about things that can happen in real life. And yet... there is something off in each of these stories. It's not always easy to put your finger on exactly what, however, and I think that is where the magic of Schweblin's writing lies for me. Because that is also real life. Sometimes something is just off, not right. Sometimes a relationship has taken a weird turn and you can't quite say what it was that made it go sour. Sometimes something someone says will stick in your throat and you won't really know why it has hit you that way. The stories in Seven Empty Houses are all marked by these kind of real-life relationships, memories, moments, hardships which can both forge real connections or absolutely shatter reality. They reveal the cruelty we contain within ourselves, but also our ability to be kind and understanding and warm.

Seven Empty Houses is made up of seven great stories. 'None of That' is a great opener as it drops the reader right into a complicated mother-daughter relationship. Why does the mother insist on driving through these neighbourhoods? Why is she sneaking into other people's houses? And what does the daughter do about it? 'My Parents and My Children' continues to play on this unease with parental relationships, as a father searches for his children and his parents with his soon-to-be ex-wife. It is the childish and senior innocence in contrast to the mature sadness here that got me. 'It Happens All the Time in This House' was the story that struck me from the beginning, dealing with loss and sadness and a search for connection despite it all. It advocates strongly for empathy in the face of denial. 'Breath from the Depths' is the longest story in the collection and tracks an elderly woman's decline into a kind of paranoid senility. She is unsure and suspicious of everything, unwilling to face certain truths and unable to see past her own lies. Because of its length this story can go a lot deeper than the others and I found myself absolutely fascinated by it.

'Two Square Feet' asks a question I think every woman has asked herself. How much space do I really take up? What is really mine? Who and what am I, in this world? 'An Unlucky Man' is perhaps the trickiest of the stories in this collection. A girl remembers her 8th birthday on which her attention-seeking sister gets rushed to the hospital, where the birthday girl is potentially exposed to a predator or entertained by an unlucky man. The last story, 'Out', shows a woman desperate to get out of her and her husband's apartment, out of the conversation they're having. She is so desperate, in fact, she leaves while wrapped in a bathrobe and gets into a stranger's car. This story is a little less focused, I feel, than the others, but full of fascinating ideas.

I continue to be in love with Samanta Schweblin's writing, guided carefully by Megan McDowell. Originally published in 2015 as Sieta casa vacias, this is Schweblin's first short story collection. It is odd, in a way, to get a glance at an author's "beginnings" after you've gotten to know them through their more "mature" works. Much of what I loved about Schweblin's Moutful of Birds and Fever Dreams is already here, but you can also see that some of it is still germinating. Some of the stories are not quite as sharp or precise as you know Schweblin can be, while each already carries that familiar atmosphere. While Moutful of Birds and Fever Dream moved more actively in the Magical Realism or Horror genres, playing with their willingness to blur the boundaries between the real and imagined, the stories in Seven Empty Houses are all solidly earth-bound. These stories are developing that sense of unease Schweblin deploys so successfully, while still rooted in reality. While of course I don't know what the Spanish is like, I must say that Megan McDowell once again brilliantly translates Schweblin's prose. The word choice is utterly precise which, oddly enough, allows for that distinct sense of wrongness to shine through.

Seven Empty Houses is a fascinating collection of stories about loss, relationships, and uncertainty. Each draws a different portrait, yet each story is also thematically tied to the rest. Samanta Schweblin continues to be one of the most exciting contemporary authors I have the honour to read.

Samanta Schweblin in this collection of short stories demonstrates that she is a immesnly capable writer. Her stories are original and they are good but I liked Fever dream much more.

I didn't really know what to expect from this collection of stories but what I found was myself completely immersed in them and not coming up for air until they were done. I really enjoyed them

Actual Rating: 4.5/5 stars

As with any of her previous works, I foresee Seven Empty Houses being met with mixed critiques, ranging from boring to fascinating. I fall confidently within the second camp; to me, I was engrossed, fascinated and immersed in what I find the authors best work to date.

Schweblins 2015 collection, now making its debut in English translation, doesn’t contain your typical “horror” stories. In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if many traditionally western readers wouldn’t place this in the horror-category at all. Within the walls of these 7 empty houses, you won’t find any ghosts, goblins or ghouls. Instead, you’ll find them haunted by a dread of another nature entirely.
With Fever Dream and Mouthful of Birds, Schweblin already demonstrated her pension for domestic horror; creating dread and unease within the smallest and most mundane situation. It’s such a distinct and difficult feeling to nail but she does so perfectly within Seven Empty Houses. Each story (or house, in the case of this collection) on the surface, seems to depict an unremarkable scene. Yet each brings with them a unique atmosphere and emotion for the reader, ranging from dread to heartbreak, to vicarious shame and an almost voyeuristic sense of intruding into another’s personal space.

In None of That, a woman delirious with the shock of a car-crash, enters the home of a helpful stranger, only to take off with her sugar-bowl. Her daughter tries to talk sense into her mother, following this completely irrational behaviour.

In My Parents and My Children, a mother anxiety over leaving her children with her aging parents is laid bare in a literal way.

In It Happens All the Time (one of the shortest and my favourite out of the stories) a woman observes a strange weekly ritual play out in her neighbour’s yard. After an emotional argument, the husband scatters their deceased sons clothing from the window, to land in the trees like rain.

In Breath from the Depth, an elderly woman struggles with the deterioration and defamiliarization with her own body and memories in aging.

In 2 Square Feet a woman reminisces over the space she, her body and all her stuff take up in the world, as she’s on a night-time grocery-run for aspirin for her mother-in-law.

In An Unlucky Man, a young girl, having witnessed a traumatic event, is helped out by an unfamiliar man. Is he a good Samaritan, or taking advantage of a vulnerable situation?

And finally, in Out, a woman stumbles through the nightly streets in her bathrobe and slippers, in a desperate flight from her apartment, and a difficult conversation with her husband.

Each of these stories will creep up on you, leaving you thinking about them long after you’ve finished, their dread growing over time. I can see this being very “niche” in its appeal, but if you’re a fan of this warping-the-mundane-style of horror, this is a masterpiece within its genre. Perfect for fans of Mouthful of Birds, Things We Say in the Dark, From the Neck Up or even In the Dream House.


Many thanks to One World Publications for providing me with an ARC in exchange for an honest review. All opinions are my own.

Argentine author Samanta Schweblin forms part of a new wave of Latin American writers of weird and speculative fiction. Seven Empty Houses is her latest book to be translated into English (by Schweblin's faithful translator Megan McDowell). It consists of a slim volume of seven short stories, all of which tap into the Gothic trope of the “empty” or “abandoned” house.

In traditional horror fiction, the empty house is “shunned”, because more often than not, it is “haunted” by ghosts, demons or by memories of violence and grief. The image of the “haunted house” is powerful precisely because it turns on its head our expectation that houses should be safe havens of domesticity. None of the houses in Schweblin’s collection are literally vacant or haunted. Their “emptiness” is figurative, in the sense that the houses are marked by or tainted with a sense of loss – whether loss of memory and reason (as in the longest story “Breath from the Depths”) , or loss of innocence, or simply an absence which turns safe spaces into dangerous ones.

Schweblin manages to create a sense of unease using the simplest of means. Take the opening story, “None of That”. A mother and her daughter end up in the house of a young family. The mother takes over the house, rearranging things, behaving as if the house is hers, and finally making off with a sugar bowl. Retold in a few words, the premise seems downright banal. But the story effectively conveys an escalating feeling of panic. What would you do if a stranger invades your house and doesn’t want to leave? Those who like their horror gory and melodramatic will need to look elsewhere. Lovers of the unheimlich will be delighted.

These stories are not nearly as disconcerting as I'd hoped for. Almost all of them turn on the eponymous houses, long established in literature as symbols of stability, interiority and domesticity, and encoded as particularly feminised spaces which can be entered, violated and also emptied out, things from which one can depart.

And these thematics can be traced in the stories though without containing anything especially revelatory - a mother and daughter go into strangers' houses and find the dynamic can be overturned; grandparents create a ludic space outside of the house by dancing naked in the backyard to the consternation of their family; neighbourhoods feels strange and alien once an inhabitant leaves their house.

My favourite, 'An Unlucky Man', layers these concerns more explicitly on an adolescent female body alternatively stripped and then reclothed in contested underwear.

The writing is plain and unstylised, straightforward and unnoticeable. I didn't dislike this book but am not raving about it either.

Finalist for the 2022 US National Book Award for Translated Literature

“I’m sorry, but I’m not sure I really understand what’s happening anymore.”

Seven Empty Houses is Megan McDowell's translation of Samanta Schweblin's 2015 story collection Siete casas vacías.

Schweblin's breakthrough book in English, in McDowell's translation, was Fever Dream (2017), from Distancia de rescate (2014). That firmly and brilliantly occupied the Todorovian 'fantastic'. Mouthful of Birds (English 2019, original Pájaros en la boca, 2009) was tilted a little more to the uncanny, with a little less on supernatural elements, and more on strange situations and behaviour.

This collection does away with anything supernatural at all, but uncanny behaviour is one common thread. In several of the stories a key character appears to be suffering from dementia, and past trauma is also another key trigger.

There are of course seven stories, six around the 10-15 page length, and one more like 80 pages. In order:

None of That

“For as long as I can remember, we’ve gone out to look at houses, removed unsuitable flowers and pots from their gardens. We’ve moved sprinklers, straightened mailboxes, relocated lawn ornaments that were too heavy for the grass. As soon as my feet reached the pedals, I started to take over driving, which gave my mother more freedom. Once, by herself, she moved a white wooden bench and put it in the yard of the house across the street. She unhooked hammocks. Yanked up malignant weeds. Three times she pulled off the name “Marilú 2” from a terribly cheesy sign.”

This is perhaps typical of the collection, with the narrator's mother showing increasingly eccentric behaviour, including marching into a stranger's house and taking something which turns out to have strong sentimental value connected with loss.

My Parents and My Children

“Where are your parents’ clothes?” asks Marga. She crosses her arms and waits for my answer. She knows I don’t know. On the other side of the picture window, my parents are running naked in the backyard. “It’s almost six, Javier,” Marga tells me. “What’s going to happen when Charly comes back from the store with the kids and they see their grandparents chasing each other around?” “Who’s Charly?” I ask.”

This story, with its riotous grandparents running around naked, to the delight of their grandchildren and horror of their daughter-in-law (now divorced from their son) has elements of [book:The Governesses|44627212], here with a theme of adult censorious attitidues to innocent play.

It Happens All the Time in This House

“Mr. Weimer is knocking at the door of my house. I recognize the sound of his heavy fist, his cautious, repetitive raps. So I leave the dishes in the sink and look out into the yard: there they are again, all those clothes scattered over the grass”

At first sight this seems like a continuation of the theme in My Parents and My Children but instead is one of the collection's key themes, compulsive behaviour triggered by a traumatic loss.

Breath from the Depths

“She wanted to die, but every morning, inevitably, she woke up again. What she could do, on the other hand, was arrange everything in that direction, attenuate her own life, reduce its space until she eliminated it completely. That’s what the list was about; that, and remaining focused on what was important. She turned to it when her attention wandered, when something upset or distracted her and she forgot what it was she was doing. It was a short list:

Classify everything.
Donate what is expendable.
Wrap what is important.
Concentrate on death.
If he meddles, ignore him.”

The longest story in the collection but my personal favourite, with shades of Sammy Jankis from Nolan's Memento. An elderly, and possibly dying but not as quickly as she'd like, woman runs her life with notes, as well as an obsession with preparing for her passing on by putting everything in boxes. She gets increasingly suspicious of her husband who has, in a neighbourly fashion, befriended a boy who moved in next door, but who she suspects of being responsible for all the trouble in the area from minor nuisances to an armed robbery.

“Then he said: “The boy is missing.” She understood the close relationship this bore to her own personal desires, and for a moment she felt guilty. “He didn’t go home last night either, and it’s almost noon now.” She thought about the robbery at the rotisserie, about the banging on the fence, the fixed wrench, the chocolate milk, and the stool the boy sat on in the garden, their stool. But she said: “Isn’t there anything of yours you want to box up?”“

Two Square Feet

“My mother‑in‑law wants me to buy aspirin. She gives me two ten‑peso bills and tells me how to get to the nearest pharmacy. “Are you sure you don’t mind going?” I shake my head and walk toward the door. I try not to think about the story she’s just told me, but the apartment is small and I have to dodge so many pieces of furniture, so many shelves and cabinets full of knickknacks, that it’s hard to think about anything else. I leave the apartment and enter the dark hallway. I don’t turn on the lights; I’d rather let the light come of its own accord when the elevator doors open up and illuminate me.”

This story begins with a woman, who has recently returned to Argentina after a move overseas unsuccessfully, sent out, late at night,to buy aspirin by her mother-in-law. The streets and shops of Buenos Aires is less familiar to her than before she emigrated, plus it is past normal opening hours so the task isn't easy; and her frustration is compounded by suspecting their is some hidden in chaos of her mother-in-law's bathroom, and knowing there is some in the shipping crates that hold her own belongings. But the experience actually brings her closer to an understanding of her mother-in-law's own sense of loss.

An Unlucky Man

“The day I turned eight, my sister— who absolutely always had to be the center of attention— swallowed an entire cup of bleach. Abi was three.”

A story, narrated by a girl looking back on her 8th birthday, that starts as per the opening quote soon turns into something else. As her parents frantically try to drive Abi to A&E, the girl is asked to remove her knickers and wave them through the window to alert passing cars to their distress. Waiting in the hospital while her sister undergoes emergency treatment she chats to a stranger, a man, who takes her off to buy another pair. A friendly gesture or an abuser taking advantage? There are echoes here of My Parents and My Children.

Out

““Are you a new maintenance man in the building?”
“Well, depends what you count as ‘new’ . . . I’ve been at the building for six months now, miss.”
“And are you a roofer as well?”
“I’m an escapist, really.” We’re driving very close to the sidewalk, almost on the heels of a woman who’s carrying an empty supermarket bag and walking quickly; she looks at us sideways.
“An escapist?”
“I fix fire escapes.”
“Are you sure that’s what an escapist does?”
“I can assure you it is.”“

The narrator, frustrated with her husband, walks out of their flat and ends up on a journey into the city night with the maintanence man, the self-proclaimed escapist. This was fishing in similar territory to Two Square Feet, but for me not so successful.

My verdict

Schweblin as rendered by McDowell is a highly effective writing and nearly all the stories are individually very effective. If anything though, as a collection, I found it less of a success since, as with Mouthful of Birds, there is a sense of the author reworking similar themes.

3.5 stars - 3 by comparison to the high standard of the author/translator's own previous work although 4 by comparative standards to other writers