Occasionally a story misses the mark or is too ethereal to fully satisfy, but her fractured worlds make compelling reading. Schweblin is good at depicting the destabilising effects of grief and absence. When the stranger offers to buy her a new pair it seems perfectly natural for her to follow him to the shopping centre. Annoyed at the attention being lavished on Abi, she reveals it’s her birthday and that she is not wearing any underpants. In the waiting room, a man sits next to the girl.
Her eight-year-old sister has to endure their father waving her white underpants on a stick to clear a path through traffic. In An Unlucky Man, Abi is rushed to hospital after drinking bleach. Part of the pleasure of Schweblin’s fictions is how she subverts expectations. Initially, the mother moves the odd piece of garden furniture but, on this occasion, she drives across a carefully manicured lawn, enters the house and brazenly purloins the owner’s much-prized sugar bowl. In None of That, a mother and daughter visit wealthy residential neighbourhoods “to look at other people’s houses”. Schweblin’s characters are often unsettled by their home environment or envious of others’ domesticity. It has round red ornaments, two gold garlands, and six Santa Claus figures dangling from the branches like a club of hanged men… the Santa Clauses’ eyes are not painted exactly over the ocular depressions, where they should be.” Her dislocation is slyly conveyed when she describes her mother-in-law’s festive decorations: “The Christmas tree is pint-sized, skinny, and a light, artificial green. Lola derides the woman in her head for becoming “fat and unkempt” until she recognises, with terrifying certainty, that she is a younger version of herself.īoxes also feature in Two Square Feet, where the unnamed narrator is between homes. She recalls an incident in the supermarket where she had observed an “overly stout” woman and her son. As her mind becomes increasingly unmoored, Lola obsessively packs away her life, boxing and classifying, until she begins “to fear the worst: that death required an effort she could no longer make”.
Schweblin skilfully directs our unease until it mirrors that of her protagonist’s. Schweblin’s characters are often unsettled by their home environment or envious of others’ domesticity
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