The Yale Review | Samanta Schweblin on Paying Attention and…

angelo hernandez sias You often use the first person in your stories, yet your narrators can be reticent. One of your characters describes herself, perhaps harshly, as having a “stunted emotional intelligence.” What draws you to this clipped mode of narration?

Samanta Schweblin When I see a film that moves me, I can remember some of the scenes even many years later. But that memory is hazy—if you were to ask me what else was on the table, or what was in the street besides the character, I wouldn’t be able to answer. If I do the same exercise with plays I’ve seen, I’m able to remember almost everything. I’m sure this must have to do with the real, physical presence of the stage there in front of you. But there’s something else, too, that has to do with the form’s economy of objects.

In the theater, we sketch out a living room with a sofa, a painting, and a lamp. Those three objects represent a complete living room, yet they also have such a strong presence that they become something more: symbols, omens, signs. I think that’s how I work in the construction of my fiction, even in terms of my characters’ emotions. I want only a few objects onstage, but once they are there, I try to ensure that everything reflects upon everything else—including, of course, the reader.

AHS As an undergraduate, you studied film. You have said that while your peers were doing film and thinking film, you were doing film and thinking literature. Can you say more about how film and literature inform each other in your work?

SS I did study literature for a few months, but I quickly realized that it wasn’t going to provide the answers I was looking for. I was after a practical approach to the question of how to tell a story, while the literature major had a largely theoretical method. I found much more concrete answers in film—everything from directing the actors, to where to place light and where to accentuate shadows, to sound, to editing and its great arts of omission and point of view, to the script itself.

Still, I often had to argue against a misconception that still plagues literature: the false idea that film is more visual than writing. While it may be true that film can’t function without images, whatever we see on a screen is the same for everyone: a particular shoe chosen by the director will appear the same way to all who watch. We could imbue it with meaning if that were useful to the story, but it would take time, and it would be indirect.

Though literature seems similar to the language of cinema, it has one fundamental advantage: emotion is constructed using the reader’s experience, making it immediate. When we read a book and come to a line like “Your mother’s shoes are on the pillow,” we make a lot of unconscious decisions; those readerly decisions hold the true force of literary fiction. We cannot read that phrase without picturing a specific pair of shoes and the kind of pillow they rest on. We decide how dirty the shoes are and what material they’re made of. We may even choose our real mother’s shoes, so we know how much they weigh and how they smell and whether they are wet. We also choose a type of light for the room, possibly a time of day. It’s all vital information, and it belongs to us completely. When something finally happens to that pair of shoes, it will be charged with the full personal weight of each reader’s imagined scene.

AHS Tension—particularly that between the real and the unreal—is central to your stories. How do you ramp it up in your fiction, and what strategies do you have for noticing it in life?

SS As a child, I was tormented by people always telling me I was “too distracted.” I would get lost everywhere, I’d forget or misplace things, I never paid attention. This had such an impact on my schoolwork that my parents sent me to a psychoanalyst. Luckily, she was smart, and she simply changed the narrative that others had given me about myself. She told me, “Samanta, you don’t have a problem, and you’re not that distracted. You’re just paying attention to things that other people aren’t. You don’t have an issue with attention; you’re just focusing it elsewhere.”

Her explanation of what was happening restored my self-confidence. Because if I wasn’t looking at what others were looking at, then what was I looking at? Perhaps everything I write is an attempt to answer this question. For me, the strange and the abnormal—the things that are visible but not believed—are very real, and I see them all around me.

That’s not exactly what fascinates me, though. Rather, I’m fascinated by what goes on with other people: those who walk around without seeing things, those who suddenly seem to see them for the first time, the impact this world has on us when we suddenly stop and look at it with real attention. Sometimes I think that a good work of art, from start to finish, is really only saying one thing: “This world is a very strange place.” As readers, when we move through an apparently realistic story and then a fissure appears, something about it puts us on alert. The alarm bells that ring go beyond the plot or whatever is happening to the character. We pay true attention because this kind of break threatens our very own reality.

AHS What, if anything, follows tension? What, to you, makes for a satisfying release from dread?

SS The release of tension is not always a relief; sometimes it’s a realization or an acceptance. Above all, however, I need this release to be justified, to have a reason we needed to pass through it, an emotional core. As Simone Weil has said: “Absolutely unmixed attention is prayer.” And, elsewhere: “Every time that we really concentrate our attention, we destroy the evil in ourselves.” I hope for that feeling in the end, after the great moment of tension: a sense of relief that an evil, a poisonous darkness inside us, has been exorcised.

I think of the story “A Visit from the Chief,” which appears in Good and Evil and Other Stories. Long before I had the three main characters outlined and could see clearly what was going to happen, all I had was the need for an intense feeling of relief and healing. I was thinking of a terrible, dark event, though I didn’t yet know what the event would be. All I was interested in was the light that would come at the end, this sense that the “evil” has pierced you, and yet you’re alive and able to get on your feet again. In fact, that is literally what the character does in the story’s final line: she is moved by the discovery that she can stand on her own two feet again.

AHS Your novel Fever Dream unfolds through a (possibly imagined) dialogue. It is not a novel without setting, but setting must enter it through a kind of back door. Little Eyes, on the other hand, features city names at the head of each chapter; geography is front and center. How does place figure into your process?

SS Everything is in service to the story I want to tell. The first words—those first magical prayers or sentences that begin a story—give order to everything that comes next. They provide the story’s rules and priorities, and they must be a sort of magical incantation for the reader, a hypnotic promise that says, “There is something here that belongs to you; here, you will find an answer to that vital question you haven’t yet solved.” I love randomly opening books in bookstores and reading the first paragraphs—some are spectacular.

Each book has a different narrative, and protagonists can be presented in more or less concrete ways. I needed to start Fever Dream in that almost ghostly manner, but once the story is set in motion, the setting becomes very concrete. Little Eyes takes place in twenty-four different cities and towns around the world. Here, I needed to inform readers from the start about the choral protagonists, and to place precise markers in each space so that the reader doesn’t get lost when I start jumping from place to place.

The spaces where the stories are set are not just background. The houses where we live, the places where we buy things—they all hold personal and social memory. There is no story without place. Spaces influence behaviors, set a rhythm, create tension. For me, they are another protagonist that activates the story.

AHS Speaking of place, how does living in Berlin inform your work?

SS Roberto Juarroz, a great Argentine poet, wrote, “Once we have set foot on the other side / and find we can still return, / never again will we tread as before / and little by little, on either side, we are treading the other.”

That’s how I feel living in Berlin. I live here, but my literary setting is still Argentina. Instead of distancing me, living in another place forces me to look more closely at my own cultural context. In my new home, I am and will always be a foreigner, a person out of place. Here, I am not Argentine—I am Latin American. But in Buenos Aires, I’m no longer a porteña, because, as my friends say with furrowed brows, “hablás raro”—I talk weird.

A strange thing is going on with my language, because, immersed as I am in Berlin’s Latin bubble, my porteño Spanish has absorbed many other Spanishes. I am surrounded by people from Spain, Mexico, and Venezuela, and they all have words that I adopt as my own, because they name things that my porteño Spanish doesn’t have words for. Or sometimes I find myself speaking more neutrally, because I know my expressions won’t be understood. And when I use that Spanish as my writing tool, I wonder how much of this comes through. Is it noticeable? Does it distract the reader? Should I make an effort to use a more Argentine Spanish? I still don’t really know how to respond to these concerns, but for now, these questions keep me attuned to language. And then there is this other reality: as soon as I sit down to write and my fingers start to type, I’m once again deep in Argentina. I am an Argentine writer living far away, but all my attention remains focused there.

AHS You have spoken about literature as a form of technology. What does it do?

SS Literature is a concrete and practical tool that serves us and transforms us. Fiction allows us to rehearse emotions, try out ideas, and delve into spaces and thoughts that we otherwise could not access. Is there any other technology that lets us confront our worst monsters and test ourselves over and over, and then return to real life unscathed? Unscathed, but knowing exactly how much those wounds hurt, and where. Unscathed, but with new information about life.

I don’t know of a more spectacular technology. I read and write because I want to know how much the things that scare me most will hurt. I want to test myself and ask: Why would I do a thing like that? Would I be capable of surviving such pain? How? What for? With whom, and for how long? We read and tremble, we sweat and feel our hearts race. Reading is not just an exercise in empathy or in broadening our ideas; it’s no mere thought experiment. It is also something that happens to the body—it’s much more physical and real than we feel safe admitting. It has a real effect on the decisions we make and on how we see the world. Literature is one of our strongest and most dangerous tools.