Schweblin’s prose, translated with beautiful precision by her common translator Megan McDowell, avoids all of the stylistic traps of the generically mystical. There isn’t a gauziness, no obfuscatory veil. Schweblin’s intention is neither to mystify nor to distort. As an alternative, she seems to be on the world straight, piercing its misleading floor … Such directness and readability of language opens a singular emotional terrain the place concern and compassion conjoin. For Schweblin, the state of porousness and fragility that arouses terror can be exactly the state by which we entry that which concern holds out of attain.
