Book Review: ‘Fever Dream' by Samanta Schweblin
In February, I was surfing the Reddit feed and I came upon a post by someone on r/books. I was looking for something to read. The title of post was something like, 'Fever Dream is the most terrifying book I read'. (The post is not available. I searched it. It might be deleted or removed). So I read the whole post and the summary was 'it is terrifying'. I was interested so I ordered it from Amazon.
When it arrived, the first impression I got from the book was wonderful. It was a small book. The fonts were clear, understandable and readable. The pages were my favourite. Those yellow thick page gave it a different feel. The translation was great. 'Magan McDowell' did a pretty job in translating it.
The story starts with a lady named Amanda telling everything about her previous days in the town, to a kid named David, on a deathbed in a hospital. Amanda was there, in the town, for her vacations with her little daughter named Nina. David was interrogating Amanda or in other way, he was making her to tell everything to get to a point where everything started, where it felt like 'the worms’. So when Amanda meets a lady named Carla, mother of David, things start to get weird. Amanda becomes more and more scared day by day. And on her day of leaving the town, everything goes opposite of what Amanda had imagined.
The story was not that terrifying or scary to me. It was just different. And 'Samanta Schweblin', the author of the book, did a great job in doing that. She added a little touch of supernatural stuff which made this story a 'different story'. But the main plot is what will make someone terrified. It is because it can happen to anyone. (I read this line in a review, somewhere on Reddit or Google, which made me relate. So credit to him/her). That was the main terrifying part. The unawareness and disconcert was what made everything to happen in that town. Several things were happening, so many deaths, but people were ignoring the cause and some were unaware of the cause. This can happen in real life and this is what makes it a 'scary story'.
Another thing I felt after reading this book is it left me with many questions. I'm not going into the stuff that much because I don't want to spoil the fun. The ending is something that'll make you think why it happened. There's a small plot author put in the end which changed everything, well most of the things. This will make you question. But the book is really good. A must read book if you like fiction and something different with suspense. And when you'll start reading it, there's no going back. Because the story is so well woven and it'll keep you stick to it. And as the 'Etgar Keret', author of 'The Seven Good Years' said, 'A special novel that will stay in your mind long after you put this book down.'
