Thrice nominated for the International Booker prize, the Argentine author Samanta Schweblin is part of a wave of Latin American writers whose work has been dubbed ‘narrative of the unusual’.
While Seven Empty Houses is less fantastical than Schweblin’s previous collection, Mouthful of Birds, the unease of the uncanny persists. Written as she was moving from Buenos Aires to Berlin, the seven stories depict displacement (there are a lot of boxes) and disturbance. A woman sneaks around mansions to rearrange them; a man worries about his children staying with his nudist parents; a woman is unmoored after moving back from Spain.
One of the most unsettling stories, ‘An Unlucky Man’, is about an encounter between an eight-year-old girl and a stranger in a hospital waiting room. He takes her across the street to a shopping centre to get her Hello Kitty underwear (after she reveals that she isn’t wearing any).
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