Sinister toy story: Little Eyes, by Samanta Schweblin, reviewed

We often hear that science fiction — or ‘speculative’ fiction, as the buffs prefer — can draw premonitory outlines of the shape of things to come. Well, consider the case of this novel by an acclaimed Argentinian-born, Berlin-based writer, first published in Spanish last year. Little Eyes imagines a gadget (nothing fancy really, just a plush animal toy with camera and wifi implants) that creates a private but silent connection between its owner anda single, remote watcher.

The ‘keeper’, who buys the $279 electronic pet known as a kentuki, doesn’t know the identity of the ‘dweller’, who pays to observe another life from afar and who can move the felt-covered ‘big stiff egg’ around the keeper’s home a bit, like some stair-averse miniature Dalek. But fail to recharge a kentuki and it dies forever: no second chances.

For all their limitations, these sinister little pandas, moles, crows and rabbits fly off the world’s shelves. ‘Ultimately, people loved restrictions.’ And if lonely humans crave companionship, even from a factory-made surveillance device clad in tacky fake pelt, so ‘everyone loves to watch, to be a voyeur’.

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While the keeper acquires an invisible housemate, the dweller becomes ‘an anonymous actor in someone else’s life’. Samanta Schweblin stitches their experiences into a global tapestry of stories, from Mexico to Croatia, Peru to Italy. Veiled, virtual relationships spring up. They blossom into trust, lust, love, suspicion, jealousy or hate, or else combust in acts of violence that may see the hapless kentuki disconnected, slashed, stomped, drowned or even buried ‘alive’ in fits of vicarious rage. ‘They were important to each other,’ thinks ‘dweller’ Emilia in Lima about the German woman she oversees in faraway Erfurt, via a fluffy wired bunny: ‘What they experienced together was real.’