I start by looking at the text's narrative composition and posit the emotional mirroring between the two mothers as the origin point of a pervasive sense of dread that is concomitant with the generalized spread of toxicity in the diegetic world.
Unlike other critical work on Fever Dream, this essay does not focus on the novel's environmental concerns at the expense of its aesthetic operations instead, it considers them in tandem, arguing that only through an attention to the latter can the former be discerned in earnest. My reading elucidates the multiple and dynamic interconnections between emotion, toxicity, and literary form in this text. a)-is textualized in Schweblin's novel at various levels and through a series of formal and thematic means. This essay examines how disquietude-which I use here as the umbrella term that comprises fear and a general sense of apprehension, "uneasiness, anxiety, worry" ("Disquiet," def. Jesse Ball-whose novel The Curfew is quoted in Fever Dream's epigraph-warns the reader: "Schweblin will injure you." 2 Fear, of course, is one of the emotions linked to the aesthetic experience since Aristotle's study of tragedy in her novel, Schweblin masterfully constructs a plot that interweaves contemporary anxieties around ecological disaster and environmental toxicity with a feeling of unremitting maternal dread, in a narrative whose pace is dictated by the impending onset of death. Samanta Schweblin's Fever Dream ( Distancia de rescate) can be read as a literary exploration of disquietude: trepidation, apprehension, fear, and dread are the troubling affects that give the novel its distinctive "feeling tone." 1 The excerpts from the press reviews included in the English edition capture the overwhelming emotional potency that readers find in it: qualifiers such as "disquieting," "thrilling," "frightening," "nauseous," and "disturbing" all come up "terrifying" and "eerie" appear more than once, with some reviewers vividly describing the "dread" and "fear" triggered by the book in striking bodily terms: "by the end I could hardly breathe," writes Max Porter.
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