Mouthful of Birds
I admit I’ve grown a bit tired of people using the phrase “fever dream” to describe a book. Are we describing a rave, a haunted house, or what? Some phrases get thrown around so much and then become somewhat meaningless and amorphous. What do they really MEAN in real-life parlance? (Is this just my issue?)
The first book I read in 2023 was Seven Empty Houses, a short story collection by the Argentinian writer Samanta Schweblin. {YES, I know that her novel that was longlisted for the International Booker is titled, ahem, Fever Dream.} I really liked it. Now, after reading another of Schweblin’s story collections — Mouthful of Birds — I have a better feel for her *oeuvre* (another word that gets bandied around). And, well, I guess it’s best described as … a perpetual fever dream.
So! Now that I’ve put my foot in my mouth, here’s what it actually means when someone says “fever dream.” The Sleep Foundation, which sounds like the authority on such matters, says that “Fever dreams are vivid, often bizarre or unpleasant dreams (when you have a fever)…” In addition to the more typical montages associated with regular dreams (“I was in a house but it wasn’t my house…”), an element of fear or stress pervades fever dreams and you can’t figure out how to “solve” them.
Stories in Mouthful of Birds point to a feeling of entrapment. When there’s no escape (from a strange family member, from a train station, from the toy store you must live in because your mother has locked herself inside your house with all the keys), you might feel like you’re experiencing a bizarre and unsettling “house of mirrors” look at reality. You might feel like you have to keep looking over your shoulder because there is no context for what to expect. It’s not a nightmare, it’s a Dalí painting. I loved that I had to flip a different switch in my brain to think differently while reading. (I wasn’t in a dream-like trance state — who can read effectively like that? — but I sort of thought about it that way.) Interestingly, the last few stories featured characters talking about their own bizarre dreams, which brought this idea of figuring out what something really *means* full circle.
Dream on.
originally published on instagram