For the keeper, there is a permanent tension between the satisfaction of ownership and the barely acknowledged risk of effectively inviting a stranger into the home. As with any unfamiliar gadget, user mileage may vary. If a kentuki model fails to recharge its battery, or severs its connection for any other reason, that individual model is effectively “dead,” the connection between keeper and dweller permanently broken.Īnd so these “little eyes” begin to proliferate until within a matter of months they become ubiquitous. As an added twist, kentuki connections are assigned at random, strictly at a rate of one per purchase. With their identities hidden behind a username, kentuki dwellers are able to spy on every aspect of life within the home and family of the keeper they have been paired with. Rather than purchasing a kentuki model, kentuki dwellers purchase the software code that enables the kentuki to operate, forming an instant and unique connection with a kentuki model that could be anywhere in the world. Those wishing to purchase a kentuki can choose to be either a “keeper” or a “dweller.” While keepers get to take home their chosen animal, dwellers will find themselves in possession of an unprecedented chance to broaden their life experience.

A new craze is sweeping the world: small, semi-autonomous devices called kentukis are being sold to an eager public as the ultimate electronic “companion animal.” Available in an attractive range of colours and models-crow, mole, dragon, rabbit-kentukis are also a new and addictive form of social media. Little Eyes is, on the surface at least, more relaxed and expansive in tone than Fever Dream, its plot and guiding conceit more immediately apparent. Fever Dream went on to win a thoroughly deserved Shirley Jackson Award in the best novella category, and it is good to see that Schweblin’s new novel Little Eyes has been published in English translation-again by Megan McDowell-more or less simultaneously with the Spanish original. The text was dense with literary allusions and disorientating imagery, so skillfully compacted that the book felt freighted with powerful significance in spite of its short length. Fever Dream was a tightly woven, deeply unsettling work that combined themes of business corruption and environmental pollution in a nightmarish narrative detailing a personal crisis and possibly, a ghost story.

The work of Argentinean writer Samanta Schweblin first became available to an English-language audience with the publication in 2017 of her novella, Fever Dream, translated from the Spanish by Megan McDowell.

Little eyes samanta schweblin