Little Eyes: LONGLISTED FOR THE BOOKER INTERNATIONAL PRIZE, 2020
By Samanta Schweblin and Megan McDowell
3.5/5
()
About this ebook
A Guardian & Observer Best Fiction Book of 2020 * A Sunday Times Best Science Fiction Book of the Year * The Times Best Science Fiction Books of the Year * NPR Best Books of the Year
World Literature Today's 75 Notable Translations of 2020 * Ebook Travel Guides Best 5 Books of 2020 * A New York Times Notable Book of 2020
They’re not pets. Not ghosts or robots. These are kentukis, and they are in your home. You can trust them. They care about you...
They've infiltrated apartments in Hong Kong, shops in Vancouver, the streets of Sierra Leone, town squares of Oaxaca, schools in Tel Aviv, bedrooms in Indiana. Anonymous and untraceable, these seemingly cute cuddly toys reveal the beauty of connection between far-flung souls – but they also expose the ugly truth of our interconnected society.
Samanta Schweblin's wildly imaginative new novel pulls us into a dark and complex world of unexpected love, playful encounters and marvellous adventures. But beneath the cuddly exterior, kentukis conceal a truth that is unsettlingly familiar and exhilaratingly real. This is our present and we’re living it – we just don’t know it yet.
*Little Eyes comes with two different covers, and the cover you receive will be chosen at random*
Samanta Schweblin
Samanta Schweblin is the author of three story collections and two novels, which have won numerous awards, including the prestigious Juan Rulfo Story Prize, and been translated into twenty languages. Her debut novel Fever Dream was shortlisted for the Man Booker International Prize 2017, and her short-story collection Seven Empty Houses won the National Book Award for Translated Literature 2022. Originally from Buenos Aires, she lives in Berlin.
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Reviews for Little Eyes
170 ratings8 reviews
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5it's not ALL as disturbing as the first chapter. some of it is sweet.I definitely got caught up in everyone's drama, which says a lot for how well written it is.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5I like this book more the more I think about it. Its organization reminds me of an episode of TAL, though it revisits storylines as the book progresses. The story about the artist's lover stood out to me the most. In some aspects, the book is a lot like an episode of Black Mirror, though it allows for more introspection. Also, unlike Black Mirror, not all of the characters are absolutely horrible. I did leave the book sad and thoughtful, but not with absolutely no hope for humanity.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5I need a kentuki!!!!
A kentuki is a robotic toy animal (stuffed animal...plushie...whatever you call them in your neck of the woods) with a camera inside.
You can either be the person who lives with the kentuki (the Keeper) or you can be the person who controls the kentuki remotely (the Dweller). I want to be the Dweller. I want to be the one who watches. It's kind of like a one-on-one reality TV.
The match up is completely random so you don't know where your kentuki is until the person it lives with wakes it up and you suddenly see this stranger and the inside of their house on your screen. Don't worry. They don't know who YOU are or WHERE you are unless you get yourself emotionally involved and TELL them.
Thanks to my friend Heidi for telling me about this great little book. Now, someone please invent a real kentuki and I will gladly hand over my $279.00. - Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Samanta Schweblin is an Argentinian writer with a German name. I should look into that. Anyway, we've heard that people in the rest of the world can tell a novel from the USA because we always have a happy ending. This woman is definitely not from the USA. Little Eyes represents kentukis which are little mechanical creatures that can be controlled, inhabited by a person connected on the internet. There are Keepers who have these cute, animal shaped pets in their home, and Dwellers who inhabit the pets. So keepers voluntarily let strangers roll around and view their homes, and Dwellers get to experience places they never would have seen otherwise. If it sounds creepy, some of it is. Kentukis can bring out the hope and sweetness of a child and the sadism of a Keeper. They can be superheros or lonely voyeurs. The novel was longlisted for the Man Booker International Prize and is worth a read, even while it makes you itchy.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5I liked Schweblin's Fever Dream, but did not love it. It felt short and a little unfinished. Also, the nature of a fever dream gives an excuse to write anything (kind of like the elementary school writing trope "and then I woke up"). I decided to give this one a go because it was nominated for the Booker International (my favorite literary award). And I am so glad I did. This one is original and creepy. It's sci fi-ish and speculative-ish, but really it almost isn't. But then, I can't believe people allow Alexa and Google home devices in their houses. Too creepy for me, I don't even give apps access to the microphone on my phone and very few (zoom LOL) on my computer. Schweblin's premise in this book revolves around a tech gadget called a kentuki. Consumers can choose to "keep" or "occupy" one. The kentuki itself is a rolling plastic/fur critter--rabbit, mole, dragon, panda, etc. Those that keep one buy the object and charge it up. Those that choose to occupy purchase a code and log in, and are then linked to a kentuki somewhere in the world. They can see and hear what goes on in their kentuki's home. They are given as gifts to children and grandparents, purchased by the lonely, the bored, the wealthy.So while owners treat them as pets or even assistants, there is a human behind the camera. A child? Old woman? Pedophile? Kentukis cannot speak, but many keepers/occupiers devise methods of communication.It can all get a little creepy and disturbing. There is SO MUCH to discuss about this book.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5No one would ever call Argentinian author Samanta Schweblin, who at one point in her career was estimated by Granta to be “one of the 22 best writers in Spanish under the age of 35,” a particularly prolific author. Between 2002 and the present, the author has published just three short story collections and two novels in addition to having stories published in magazines such as Harper’s and The New Yorker. Two of her books have been considered for the prestigious Man Booker International Prize: her first novel, Fever Dream, as a finalist, and her second short story collection, A Mouthful of Birds, as a longlisted candidate. Little Eyes, published in Spanish in 2018 under the title Kintukis, has only now been translated into English by Megan McDowell.So what are Kintukis? Well, as it turns out, they are little toy-like animals on wheels that at first glance appear to have been created to amuse small children. But these little guys are a whole lot more than toys. The little rabbits, moles, dragons, crows, etc., all come equipped with cameras and microphones that allow their human controllers to observe, and sometimes manipulate, everything their owners do. In an age when most of us are wondering just how closely we are being watched by our own smart devices – think Amazon Alexa and smart TVs, among other devices – this is a terrifying proposition. Schweblin tells her story in a manner that allows readers to observe for themselves several rotating relationships between Kintuki “dwellers” (those who purchase a tablet that controls one particular Kintuki from afar) and Kintuki “keepers” (those who choose to allow a Kintuki into their home) as the relationships evolve over time. The pairings are randomly assigned, meaning that a dweller cannot choose the location of the Kintuki they control, and that a keeper knows nothing at all about the real person following them around. The pairings, too, are largely international ones, giving dwellers (whose tablets all have built-in translators) a distinct advantage over their keepers. In short, alternating sections, readers watch budding relationships between people from all over the world (Beijing – Lyon; Lima - Erfurt; Zagreb – Cartagena; Antigua – Honningsvåg, for example) evolve into troubling manipulations, dependencies, extortions, and the like, that negatively impact the real worlds of both the dwellers and the keepers. It may sound farfetched, but is it really? We already live in a world dominated by social media through which “dwellers” burrow their way inside the heads of “keepers” so desperate for approval they allow themselves to be negatively impacted by perfect strangers, sometimes even to the point of suicide.Who can say that something like this is not the next logical step in social media evolution?Bottom Line: Little Eyes is a terrifying glimpse into a future just one or two steps evolved past what the world accepts as perfectly normal today. And that is a terrifying thought.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Having just come off of Bubblegum by Adam Levin I was by chance set to the perfect moment to read Samanta Schweblin's Little Eyes. I highly recommend reading both either at the same time or one after the other and in no particular order. Little eyes is about little consumer products called Kentukis. They are a highly sought after product that has gained popularity all over the globe. However you wont really figure this out until the second or third short section of the book. And this is wonderful. Its a great disorienting effect that makes the story all the more gripping. Its very similar to Bubblegum in that way. From the get go you will not really know or get what is going on but its gripping nonetheless. All of this to say Samanta Schweblin is an astonishingly shocking story teller. This is culture-horror. Bubblegum by Adam Levin also is culture-horror. It's totally unsettling story about the scary places that culture and technology and play can take humanity when the absurdity knob is set to just a touch above normal. The kentukis connect the owner to users. A owner buys the kentuki and a user connects to the cutely designed kentuki via webportal and can move the kentuki on its roller feet and see and hear what the kentuki does via cameras set into the eyes. Little Eyes spans Hong Kong, Senegal, Oaxaca, Lima, Tel Aviv, Ohio, and Vancouver. Tales unravel in short and long pieces where people encounter criminal enterprises, lonely older people connect with young people. The kentuki owner relationships explore trust and love and the tenderness we can have and also the horrific ugliness that is part of what we know in the connected world we inhabit. In the world of Little Eyes its just a little bit worse at the start and things get increasingly horrific from there from moments of tenderness to terrors beyond belief.Little Eyes explores big ideas in a series of interconnected tales and stories that form a novel that is just beautifully written.
- Rating: 1 out of 5 stars1/5Gave up half way through. Didn't really care what happened to any of the characters and there seemed to be no links between the different narratives, so it reads like a series of short stories. Neither of those is necessarily a black mark so far as I'm concerned - I can think of other books where I didn't like most (or any) of the characters and/or which had a very episodic structure, but which I still enjoyed. However, I think if you are going down that route, there needs to be something else about the book to keep you reading - for example, the quality of the writing needs to be top notch or there needs to be some really interesting stuff going on in terms of ideas (or a sense of something quite significant being at stake). In this case, the writing on its own wasn't enough for me and I didn't find the concept of the Kentukis particularly original, compelling or well developed.
Book preview
Little Eyes - Samanta Schweblin
South Bend
THE FIRST THING they did was show their tits. The three of them sat on the edge of the bed facing the camera, took off their shirts, and one by one, removed their bras. Robin had almost nothing to show but she did it anyway, paying more attention to the looks she got from Katia and Amy than to the game itself. If you want to survive in South Bend, she’d heard the girls say once, you have to make friends with the strong.
The animal’s camera was installed behind its eyes, and sometimes it spun around on the three wheels hidden in its base, moving forward or backward. Someone was controlling the creature from somewhere else, and they didn’t know who it was. The animal looked like a simple and artless plush panda bear, though really it was more similar to a football with one end sliced off so it could stand upright. Whoever was on the other side of the camera was trying to follow them without missing a thing, so Amy picked up the panda and put it on a chair so it would be right at the height of their tits. The gadget was Robin’s, but everything Robin had was also Katia’s and Amy’s: that was the blood pact they had made on Friday, the pact that would join them together for the rest of their lives. And now they each had to do their own little show, so they got dressed again.
Amy put the animal back on the floor, picked up the bucket she’d brought from the kitchen, and placed it upside down over the panda. The bucket moved nervously, blindly, around the room. It collided with notebooks, shoes, and clothing strewn on the floor, which seemed to make it grow more desperate. Amy started to pant and let out excited moans, and the bucket stopped moving. Katia joined in the game, and they acted out a long and profound simultaneous orgasm.
That doesn’t count as your show,
Amy warned Katia as soon as they managed to stop laughing.
Of course not,
said Katia, and she darted out of the room. Get ready!
she cried as she ran down the hall.
Robin didn’t usually feel all that comfortable with these games, though she admired Katia’s and Amy’s nerve, and the way they talked to boys, and how they managed to keep their hair always smelling good and their nails perfectly painted. When the games crossed certain lines, Robin wondered if they might not be testing her. She’d been the last one to join the club,
as they called themselves, and she tried hard to be worthy.
Katia returned to the room with her backpack. She sat down in front of the bucket and freed the panda.
Pay attention,
she said, looking at the camera, and the bear’s eyes followed her.
Robin wondered if it could understand them. It seemed to hear them perfectly well, and they were speaking English, which is what everyone speaks. Maybe speaking English was the only good thing about having been born in a city as terribly boring as South Bend.
Katia opened her backpack, took out her yearbook, and looked for the class photo. Amy clapped and shouted:
You brought the little whore? You’re gonna show him?
Katia nodded. She flipped the pages eagerly, the tip of her tongue poking out between her lips. When she found the girl she was looking for, she opened the album wide and held the photo in front of the bear. Robin peered over the book to see. It was Susan, the weird girl from her biology class that the club bullied for fun.
They call her Big Ass,
said Katia. She pursed her lips a couple of times, the way she did whenever she was about to do some high-level mischief, which was what being a member of the club demanded. I’m going to show you how to make some free money with her,
Katia told the camera. Robin, darling, could you hold the book while I show the gentleman his job?
Robin went over and held the book, unsure. Amy looked on curiously; she didn’t know Katia’s plan either. Katia scrolled through her phone until she found a video, and then she held the screen up in front of the bear’s eyes. In the video, Susan lowered her stockings and underpants. It seemed to be filmed from the floor of the school bathroom, inside a stall; maybe the camera had been set up between the trash can and the wall. They heard some farts, and the three of them rolled with laughter, and they cried out in pleasure when, before flushing, Susan stood looking down at her own shit.
This chick is loaded, my dear,
said Katia. Half for you and the other half for us. It’s just that the club can’t blackmail her again, the teachers already have their eyes on us.
Robin didn’t know what they were talking about, but it wasn’t the first time the club hadn’t included her in its most illegal activities. Soon Katia’s show would be over and it would be her turn, and she hadn’t thought of anything. Her hands were sweating. Katia took out her notebook and a pen and wrote down some information.
Here’s Big Ass’s full name, phone number, e-mail, and mailing address,
she said as she held up the notebook alongside the photo.
And just how is our little guy going to get us our share of the money?
Amy asked Katia, winking at the camera and the presumed man behind it. Katia hesitated. We don’t know who the hell he is,
said Amy. "That’s why we showed him our tits, right?
Katia looked at Robin, as if asking her for help. It was in those brief moments that they counted on her, when Katia and Amy reached the heights of their individual rapaciousness and went to war with each other.
How is the gentleman going to give us his e-mail, huh?
Amy went on, mocking Katia’s plan.
I know how,
said Robin.
They both looked at her in surprise.
This would be her show, she thought, this was how she would emerge unscathed from the situation. The panda also turned toward her, trying to follow what was happening. Robin put the book down, went to her wardrobe, and opened a few drawers. She came back with a Ouija board that she opened and set down on the floor.
Get on,
she said to the animal.
And the bear did. The three plastic wheels on its base easily maneuvered onto the cardboard; it moved across the length of the alphabet, as if investigating. Though its body took up more than one letter at a time, soon enough they understood which one it was pointing at, hidden between its wheels. The bear settled in under the arch of the alphabet and waited. It apparently knew exactly how to use a Ouija board. Robin wondered what she would do when the other girls left and she was alone again with this bear, now that she’d shown it her tits and had taught it a way to communicate with her.
Awesome,
said Amy.
And Robin’s mouth twisted into a smile.
Which of the three of us do you think has the best tits?
asked Katia.
The bear moved quickly over the board’s letters.
THEBLOND
Katia smiled proudly, clearly aware it was true.
How had she not thought of the Ouija board trick sooner? Robin wondered. She’d had the bear in her room for over a week, rolling around aimlessly. She could have talked calmly with him; maybe he was someone special, a boy she could have fallen in love with, and now she was ruining everything by letting Katia and Amy take over.
Do you accept the deal with Big Ass?
asked Katia, showing him the photo of Susan once more.
The bear moved, started to write again.
WHORES
Robin frowned. She felt hurt, although maybe the bear’s insult spoke well of him: she knew what they were doing wasn’t right. Katia and Amy looked at each other and smiled proudly, stuck their tongues out at the bear.
How crude,
said Amy. Let’s see, what else does the gentleman have to say to us?
Yeah, what else are we, my little dildo?
Katia egged him on, blowing him sensual kisses with her hand. What else would you like us to be?
YOUTHREE
They had to concentrate to follow the words.
WILLPAYME
The three of them looked at one another.
TITSRECORDED400PERTITIS2400DOLLARS
Amy and Katia looked at each other a few seconds and burst out laughing. Robin was clutching her shirt, squeezing hard, struggling to force a smile.
And who exactly is going to pay you, huh?
Amy asked, and pretended to be about to lift up her shirt again.
OTHERWISETITSTOSUSANSEMAIL
For the first time, Amy and Katia got serious. Robin couldn’t decide whose side she should take; maybe her panda bear was a vigilante.
You can send them to whoever you want,
said Amy. We have the best tits in the city. Nothing to be ashamed of.
Robin knew that didn’t include her. Amy and Katia high-fived. Then the bear started to dance over the board, writing nonstop, spelling words that Robin could barely manage to read.
IHAVEVIDEOSROBINSMOTHERSHITTINGANDROBINSSISTERMASTURBATINGX6
It took concentration to follow letter by letter, but they couldn’t look away.
FATHERSAYINGTHINGSTOMAID
Amy and Katia were watching the bear’s dance in fascination, patient as they waited for each new humiliation.
ROBINNAKEDANDROBINTALKINGSHITABOUTAMYONTHEPHONE
Amy and Katia looked at each other. Then they looked at Robin, and they weren’t smiling now.
ROBINPRETENDINGTOBEAMYANDTOBEKATIAANDTOKISSTHEM
The bear went on writing, but Amy and Katia stopped reading. They got up, gathered their things, and stormed out, slamming the door.
Trembling, while the bear kept moving over the board, Robin tried to figure out how the hell to turn the thing off. It didn’t have a switch—she’d already noticed that—and in her desperation she couldn’t find any other solution. She picked it up and tried to open the base with the point of a pair of scissors. The bear spun its wheels in an attempt to escape, but it was helpless. Robin couldn’t find any crack to pry open, so she returned the bear to the floor and it went straight back to the board. Robin kicked it off. The bear squealed and she cried out—she didn’t know it could make noise. She picked up the board and threw it across the room. She turned the key to lock her bedroom door and went back to chase the panda with the bucket as though she were trying to trap a giant spider. She managed to catch it and sat on the bucket, staying there a moment clutching the sides, holding her breath every time the bear hit against the plastic and trying hard not to cry.
When her mother called her to dinner, she shouted down that she wasn’t feeling good and wanted to go to bed without eating. She picked up the big wooden trunk where she stored her notes and textbooks and put it on top of the bucket, fully immobilizing it. Someone had told her that if you couldn’t break the thing, the only way to turn it off was to wait for its battery to run out. So she hugged her pillow and sat on her bed to wait. Trapped under the bucket, the bear went on squealing for hours, banging against the plastic like an overgrown hornet, until, near dawn, the room was left in complete silence.
Lima
A TEXT BOX APPEARED on the screen. It demanded a serial number, and Emilia sighed and shifted in her wicker chair. Those kinds of requirements were what most drove her to desperation. At least her son wasn’t there, silently timing her as she searched for her glasses so she could reread the instructions. Sitting at the desk in the hallway, she straightened up in the chair to relieve her back pain. She breathed in deeply, exhaled, and, double-checking each number, entered the code on the card. She knew her son didn’t have time for any non-sense, and even so she imagined him spying on her from some camera hidden in the corner, suffering in his Hong Kong office at the sight of her inefficiency, just as her husband would have suffered if he were still alive.
After selling the last gift her son had sent her, Emilia had paid the apartment’s overdue bills. She didn’t understand much about watches or designer handbags or sneakers, but she’d lived long enough to know that anything wrapped in more than two types of cellophane, packaged in felt boxes, and requiring a signature and ID on delivery was worth enough to pay a retiree’s debts; it also made it very clear how little a son knew about his mother.
They’d taken her prodigy son from her as soon as the boy turned nineteen, seducing him with obscene salaries and whisking him off to far-flung cities. Now he was never coming back to her, and Emilia still hadn’t decided whom to blame.
The screen started blinking again: Serial number accepted. Her computer wasn’t the latest model, but it was good enough for her. The second message said Kentuki connection established, and right away a new program opened. Emilia frowned—what good were these kinds of messages, indecipherable to her? They exasperated her, and they were almost always related to the contraptions her son sent her. Why waste time trying to understand gadgets she would never use again? She wondered this every time. She looked at the clock. It was already almost six. Her boy would surely call to ask what she thought of the gift, so she made one last effort to focus. On the screen the program was now showing a keyboard with controls, like the one on a naval-battle game she used to play on her son’s phone, before those people from Hong Kong took him away. Above the keyboard, the program was proposing the action Wake up. She selected it. A video took up most of the screen and the control keyboard was summarized at the sides, simplified in little icons. In the video, Emilia saw the kitchen of a house. She wondered if this could be her son’s apartment, though it wasn’t his style, and the boy would never let the place get so messy or cram it so full of stuff. There were magazines on the table under some beer bottles, mugs, and dirty plates. Farther back, the kitchen opened onto a small living room that was in more or less the same condition.
There was a soft murmuring sound, like a humming, and Emilia leaned closer to the screen to try to understand. Her speakers were old and fuzzy. The sound repeated and she discovered that it was actually a feminine voice: Someone was talking to her in another language and she didn’t understand a word. Emilia could follow English—if it was spoken slowly—but this didn’t sound anything like English. Then someone appeared on-screen, a girl whose blond hair was wet. The girl spoke again, and the program asked in another text box if it should activate the translator. Emilia accepted, selected Spanish for her language, and now when the girl spoke there were subtitles on the screen.
¿Me escuchas? ¿Me ves?
Can you hear me? Can you see me?
Emilia smiled. On her screen she saw the girl come closer. She had blue eyes, a nose ring that didn’t suit her at all, and a concentrated expression, as if she, too, had doubts about what was happening.
Yes,
said Emilia, in English.
It was all she had the nerve to say. It’s like talking over Skype, she thought. She wondered if her son knew the girl; she prayed this wasn’t his girlfriend, because in general, she didn’t tend to get along with messy women in low-cut clothes. It wasn’t prejudice, just sixty-four years of experience.
Hola,
she said, just to be sure the girl couldn’t hear her.
The girl opened a manual the size of her hands, brought it very close to her face, and sat reading for a moment. Maybe she wore glasses, but was embarrassed to put them on in front of the camera. Emilia still didn’t understand what this was all about, but she had to admit she was starting to feel a bit curious. The girl read and nodded, stealing an occasional glance at Emilia over the manual. Finally she seemed to make a decision, and she lowered the manual and spoke in her unintelligible language. The translator wrote on the screen:
Close your eyes.
The order surprised Emilia, and she sat up straighter in her chair. She closed her eyes and counted to ten. When she opened them the girl was still looking at her, as though waiting for some kind of reaction. Then she saw on the screen of her controller a new window prompt that helpfully offered the option Sleep. Could the program have some way of hearing instructions? Emilia selected the Sleep option and the screen went dark. She heard the girl cheer and clap, then speak to her again. The translator wrote:
Open them! Open them!
The controller offered her a new option: Wake up. When Emilia selected it, the video came on again. The girl was smiling at the camera. This is dumb, thought Emilia, though she had to admit it was kind of fun. There was something exciting about the interaction, though she still didn’t understand exactly what. She selected Forward and the camera moved a few centimeters toward the girl, who smiled, amused. Emilia saw her slowly bring her index finger closer, very slowly, until she was almost touching the screen, and then she heard her speak again.
I’m touching your nose.
The subtitle letters were large and yellow, and Emilia could read them comfortably. She activated Back up and the girl imitated her, visibly intrigued. It was quite clear that this was her first time as well, and that she was in no way judging Emilia for her lack of knowledge. They were sharing the surprise of a new experience, and Emilia liked that. She backed up again, the camera moved farther away, and the girl clapped her hands.
Wait.
Emilia waited. The girl walked away and Emilia took the opportunity to activate Left. The camera turned and she got a better view of how small the apartment was: a sofa and a door to the hallway. The girl spoke again; she wasn’t in the frame anymore but the translator still transcribed her words.
This is you.
Emilia turned back to her original position and there was the girl again. She was holding a box at the level of the camera, a few centimeters away. The lid was open and the label on the box said kentuki. It took Emilia a few moments to understand what she was seeing. The front of the box was almost all clear cellophane; she could see that it was empty, and on the sides were photos—in profile, head on, and from the back—of a pink-and-white stuffed animal, a pink-and-white rabbit that looked more like a watermelon than a rabbit. It had bulging eyes and two long ears attached to the top. A clip shaped like a bone held them together, keeping them upright for a few centimeters, after which they fell languidly to either side.
You’re a cute little bunny,
said the girl. Do you like bunnies?
Oaxaca
SHE COULD SEE FORESTS and hills just outside the large room they’d been given, and the intense