More Literature and Art Pairings from Olyn

This month’s pairing is among my favorites for sheer visceral values. 

If Argentinian author Samanta Schweblin and British artist Damian Hirst ever get together for drinks and conversation, I want to be at the next table eavesdropping.  

These two imaginative creators have muses that arrive from the same dark cave. Each presents commentary steeped in strongly-felt and unsettling visions, and both embrace deep and darkly wrought observations. 

Fever Dream by Samanta Schweblin came as a gripping surprise to me. I had no idea what I was in for when I picked up this dark and troubling impressionistic novel. And now that I’m done, I’m not sure what the heck just happened to me. I devoured the book compulsively; with mouth open, one hand gripping my chest. 

This is a mind-bending story, as frightening and dark as it is lyrically rendered and filled with tender writing and compassionate commentary. Reading this work is a bit like watching a frightening accident unfolding, you can’t watch but can’t tear yourself away. I can honestly say I had no idea what was happening through much of the book, but that didn’t stop me from absorbing aghast, every bit of the dialogue that was used exclusively to tell the tale. 

Toward the book’s end, pieces of understanding came slowly together through the dread-ridden fog that had been gathering in my consciousness. I recognized that the book’s puzzle involved a confused mother filled with love and dread for her child, but understood much more was embedded just under the surface—I just couldn’t see it yet. 

Why, for instance, did she fear the child she loved so much? What was with the worms? Who was this boy David by her hospital bed—someone she knew but did not know? And how were his questions going to save her? 

The entire book reads, not like a mystery, more as a puzzle. Written entirely in unbroken dialogue with no narration outside the voices of David and Amanda, it is experimental and overwhelming. If part of the purpose of this book is to provoke visceral unease, it is a complete success. However, there is much more happening here. Concern for the environment, for instance. And commentary on relationships, neighbours, family, motherhood. I finished this book cowering into the corner of my couch. Can someone help me up please? 

Pairs Perfectly with:

The raw enormity of British artist Damian Hirst’s statues, both from his exhibition Treasures from the Wreck of the Unbelievable presented at the 57^th Venice Biennale, and various public works, underscores their ability to be both awe inspiring and terrifying. 

These deeply unsettling and often controversial bronze behemoths evoke horror, or disgust, of the can’t-turn-away variety. Exquisitely wrought with lavish technical ability—the bronzes cast by a foundry in western England and the marbles carved in the Carrara region of Italy—they are at once audacious and indisputably compelling. Their ability to evoke viscerally disturbing thoughts and emotions have cast Hirst by his critics as both a creator of “bloated folly” and a “triumphant” artist. Whichever tack you want to take, the depth of Hirst’s message is so similar to many in Fever Dream it is fittingly spooky. 

The New Yorker describes Fever Dream as Ecological Horror—which Hirst’s Treasures from the Wreck of the Unbelievable indisputably is also. The New Yorker describes Fever Dream as “A vision of maternal love as something alienating and surreal.” Looking in dread at Hirst’s Pregnant Lady, I can’t believe the two haven’t collaborated in some way, which of course they have not. 

The two present works extremely similar in tone, inspiration, technique, message and shock value. If Schweblin receives attention from her critics that is more sympathetic than the input Hirt receives by his, I wonder if it is because the genre blending currently being embraced in the literary world, is lagging in the world of fine art.