Mouthful of Birds by Samanta Schweblin
“Horror and beauty! What a combination.”
Mouthful Of Birds (2019) is Argentinian author Samanta Schweblin’s hotly-anticipated collection of short stories and many (like myself) could not wait to get their hands on it. I became a little obsessed with her first book, Fever Dream (2017), and took my time coming round to this one. I was pleased with how successfully I managed to steer myself through the bookish equivalent of the marshmallow test before gobbling it up in one sitting.
As with all great short story collections, nothing is neatly packaged for our consumption. Schweblin has an uncanny way of scratching away at you lightly. You’ll be haemorrhaging nightmares before you realise what she’s done. The effect of this is more pertinent in this collection of twenty stories: the cumulative impact is not really felt until you wake up in the night three days later, stuck on an uncomfortable feeling she’s planted.
As the title hints, there is an interwoven theme of animals and humans. Animals that normally get a sweet and gentle write-up - small birds, butterflies, and dogs - become fair game for gruesome endings, which seems to be another trick Schweblin uses to subvert our normal ways of viewing things. “Butterflies” is a particularly unsettling story of a father, too busy bragging about how beautiful his daughter is, to recognise her when she presents herself in a slightly different way, with chilling consequences. In “The Test,” a man seeking to enter the ruthless world of gang-membership is taken through the prerequisite initiation task: killing a dog. The story ends with an earlier warning from a peripheral character ringing loudly in my mind when the man is left to face the consequences of his actions:
“You just don’t do that. The dogs will remember you, and later they’ll take their revenge. They know, they know. Understand?”
The focus on feminist themes and motherhood that Fever Dream centred on is continued in many of these stories. “Preserves” turns the pregnancy journey inside out, as it focuses on a woman who, feeling the pressures of the impending birth of her child, chooses to see a specialist to reverse the process “until she’s ready.” What we are left with is a strange and beguiling story of what the rituals for undoing a pregnancy might look like. The parallels with the rituals associated with being pregnant undercut the idea of what is natural, and highlight aspects of pregnancy and birth that aren’t always socially acceptable to discuss. In the final stages, the woman - who has been feeling suffocated by her pregnancy - finally gags up a tiny almond-shaped object which she spits into a jar.
Both the opening and closing stories place the lower societal status of women versus their male counterparts front and centre. In the final story, “The Heavy Suitcase of Benavides,” a man kills his wife violently and stuffs her in a suitcase, wheeling it to the home of his wealthy psychiatrist. Instead of the horror we expect, the man is exalted as a genius of the art world. The suitcase is opened and the bloody remains of his wife laid bare in a garage which is swiftly converted into a makeshift gallery. The elite queue up to glimpse the masterpiece, as the media snap photos of the scene and the “artist.” The corrupt psychiatrist and curator friend he has roped into the process cry out: “Horror and beauty! What a combination.” A powerful commentary on the ways that trauma and the violation of women’s bodies are too often made a spectacle of.
With Schweblin’s characters nobody behaves in ways we might deem “normal” and we are often left without explanations, perplexed by the realities she creates that challenge and question societal norms.
As a complete collection, this was exceptionally polished, with lots of threads tying, knotting, and tangling the themes and stories together. Despite being impeccably written, I felt some of this collection failed to hit the mark I was hoping for. Although I enjoyed the book as a whole, some stories didn’t quite meet the pulsating, atmospheric quality I found in Fever Dream. Stories such as “The Merman,” “The Digger” and “A Great Effort” felt more like sketches and proposals of bigger stories, that Schweblin might come back to at a later date to flesh out.
But is it fair to only hold a writer accountable to the one piece of work you’ve become obsessed with? I think not. And I will definitely be eagerly anticipating Schweblin’s next piece of dark and psychologically perplexing magic.
Elaine Mead is a freelance writer and book reviewer, currently residing in Hobart, Tasmania. She is passionate about the ways we can use literature to learn from our experiences to become more authentic versions of ourselves and obsessed with showing you photos of her Dachshund puppy. You can find her online under @wordswithelaine.
