Distancia de rescate by Samanta Schweblin

These writings could be read as poetical and political strategies of dissent that innovate within the genre of speculative fiction.

We will try to examine a range of subversive metamorphoses of the female body in recent speculative fiction by Cecilia Eudave, Socorro Venegas, Mariana Enríquez, Samanta Schweblin, Valeria Correa-Fiz, Florencia del Campo, Agustina Bazterrica or María Fernanda Ampuero. This essay tries to analyse these speculative narratives which we will call hemispheric and which bear some resemblance from the north to the south of the continent, for different political and traumatic reasons, focusing especially on their cinematic deployment of the HomeSpace horror, childhood memories and physical and psychological boundaries which chain us to our ancestors' memories. An important group of unusual creatures in the contemporary fiction of Latin American women authors seem to «crawl out of their skins» (Himani Bannerji). This paper interprets the way in which transnational writers use monstrosity and the uncanny to investigate the concept of the HomeSpace with dissent. The novel’s ambivalent, dread-laced depiction of a posthumanist reality in which the whole, complete, and “real” human subject is unrecoverable- and in which we contaminate and are contaminated by the familiar body of the human other as well as the foreign body of the nonhuman threat- offers, I suggest, the possibility of a new approach to ethics of responsibility in the Anthropocene. about toxic agribusiness” (Economist), yet here I argue for another interpretation of Fever Dream: one that utilizes the tropes of what Stacy Alaimo characterizes as the “material memoir,” peeling back their familiarity to expose a toxic uncanny and literalizing the leaky, confused human subject that is found dwelling in it. The novel has been read as “a toxic ecohorror tale” (Meyer) or as an “ecological horror story.

Samanta Schweblin’s 2014 novel Distancia de rescate, published in English as Fever Dream, tells the unsettling tale of a mother who, while vacationing in a rural area of Argentina, may or may not be exposed to a toxic agricultural chemical that may or may not have poisoned the area’s children, who have been subjected to an unconventional healing treatment that may or may not have displaced their souls from their bodies, causing pieces of them to reside in someone else.

Distancia de rescate by Samanta Schweblin