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These ‘Little Eyes’ Watch The World Burn

Food For Thought, ,

By Jason Sheehan

Samanta Schweblin is not a science fiction writer. Which is probably one of the reasons why Little Eyes, her new novel (translated from Spanish by Megan McDowell) reads like such great science fiction.

Like Katie Williams’s 2018 novel Tell The Machine Goodnight before it, Little Eyes supposes a world that is our world, five minutes from now. It is a place with all our recognizable horrors, all our familiar comforts and sweetnesses, as familiar (as if anything could be familiar these days) as yesterday’s shoes. It then introduces one small thing — one little change, one product, one tweaked application of a totally familiar technology — and tracks the ripples of chaos that it creates.

In Tell The Machine, it was a computer that could tell anyone how to be happy, and Williams turned that (rather disruptive, obviously impossible) technology into a quiet, slow-burn drama of family and human connection that was one of my favorite books of the past few years. Schweblin, though, is more sinister. She basically gives everyone in the world a Furby with a webcam, and then sits back, smiling, and watches humanity shake itself to pieces.

You remember what a Furby is, right? They were those creepy-cute, fuzzy animal toys that could blink and squawk and sing, dance around and respond to some basic commands. They were toys that pretended (mostly poorly) that they were alive.

Schweblin … gives everyone in the world a Furby with a webcam, and then sits back, smiling, and watches humanity shake itself to pieces.

Schweblin’s version is called a kentuki. It’s a simple, fur-covered crow or mole or bunny or dragon with cameras for eyes, wheels, a motor. And a person inside. Virtually, of course. Not, like, for real. Because that would be horrifying. And Little Eyes is absolutely horrifying, but not that kind of horrifying.

A server connection makes each Kentucki a perfect dyad: There’s the person, the “keeper,” who went out and bought the thing, brought it home, turned it on, let it loose in their home or wherever. And then there’s the “dweller,” the person who watches through the kentuki’s eyes and listens through its ears and moves it around from the (relative) safety of their own computer screen.

The keeper lets the kentuki into their lives like a pet, knowing full well that there is an actual person on the other end of it, but not knowing who. The keeper can talk and the dweller will see a translation into their language, but the dweller can’t talk back. The kentuki (with the dweller inside) can move around, hear and see, make species-appropriate noises, nothing more.

Or, actually, just one thing more. It can die.

One life per connection. That’s the deal. If either side switches off, that’s it. The kentuki is dead. If the battery runs down, if the kentuki itself is damaged in some fatal way, it’s lights out. Connections can’t be traced. They can’t be chosen or re-made. There’s a finality to the relationship. A heavy reality, bounded by life and death at either end and the juicy, exciting, terrifying, horrible middle bit where two human beings connect via the lens of a felt-covered plastic mole with camera eyes.

Narratively, Little Eyes drifts. It alights, here and there, to tell quick one-off vignettes (like the one about the retirement home director who bought a bunch of kentuki for his residents) and longer, twining stories about keepers and dwellers from all over the world. There’s Emilia in Lima, Peru — an old woman with a grown son in Hong Kong who doesn’t call her enough — who becomes a dweller inside Eva’s bunny in Erfurt, Germany. There’s Alina, at an artist’s residence in Mexico who buys a crow kentuki for company once she realizes that her artist boyfriend isn’t paying much attention to her now that he has a gallery show to get ready for.

In Antigua, a boy called Marvin is mourning his mother, who recently died. He buys a connection as a dweller and ends up inside a toy dragon living in a shop window somewhere far to the north, in Sweden, where he wants nothing so much as he wants to touch the snow. In Zagreb, Grigor has a plan — tending to dozens of kentuki connections alive on dozens of tablets, and then selling them off at a premium to customers who want a more curated experience.

Schweblin uses the multiple narrators to highlight the different facets of the keeper-dweller relationship, and at the most basic level, that’s what this kind of narrative frame is built for. But she goes further, too — using her multiple lenses (and her many sets of little eyes…) to watch as the world slowly fills up with kentuki. As they become ubiquitous, loved and loathed, used as temporary escapes from conflict zones in Sierra Leone and the focus of radical kentuki liberation activists. Is a kentuki alive-alive while it is alive? Are they dangerous? Can they be loved? Schweblin asks these questions on the sidelines of every story, showing us glimpses of Haitian taxicab kentuki used as radar detectors for $5 a run, a Swedish underground railroad for escaped kentuki, and mass burials of dead ones in Mexico.

If the idea of a human pet, of a Furby with a person inside, was a loose thread idly toyed with on page 1, then Schweblin spends the next 249 slowly pulling at it — expertly unraveling the humans on either end of the kentuki’s virtual connection. You know from the start — from the very first all-too-plausible vignette set in a teenage girl’s bedroom in Indiana — that everything will end in fire and blood and tears. You just know.

But still, you can’t stop watching. Even when you want to — even when Schweblin shatters your trust and twists the knife as Little Eyes reaches its absolutely gutting, absolutely haunting conclusions — you just can’t look away.

How To Say No: ‘Anti-Guru’ Sarah Knight Suggests You Do Less And Live More

Food For Thought, ,

By Samantha Balaban

Sarah Knight has built a career on saying no.

Her latest book, simply titled F*ck No! is a 300+ page book about how to say a single, two-letter, one-syllable word.

It’s tongue-in-cheek self-help that offers advice on how to do what Knight calls mental decluttering, in order to pare down life to the essentials.

Now, with social and professional calendars cleared, a lot of people are getting a quarantine crash course in Knight’s philosophy. “I’m hopeful that we’re all going to come out of this with some better perspective on what’s important, what isn’t,” she says.

“The books that I write are coming straight from my brain and straight from my heart,” says Sarah Knight. She’s the author of the “No F*cks Given Guides” — a series of books about mental decluttering.Alfredo Esteban Morales/Sarah Knight

This time spent at home is an opportunity to clean house, to identify what you don’t really want to be doing. The challenge will be not letting those things creep back in “when the world opens up again,” Knight says.

Long before social distancing, Knight was already something of an expert. That’s because before she was a professional nay-sayer, Knight was a senior editor at Simon & Schuster in New York City — and she’d achieved a lot of success.

“I was at a real peak,” she says.

She’d edited Gillian Flynn’s Dark Places, and The Luckiest Girl Alive by Jessica Knoll, which was the best selling debut the year it came out. She’d worked on a humor book that was being turned into a Broadway play. A lot of award winners, a lot of bestsellers.

But she was unhappy.

“Every day was a struggle to get up, to get ready, to put on makeup, to put on heels, to get on the subway, to go to work,” Knight says. “I started having a lot of panic attacks and some depression and some just real big questioning, existential: What am I doing with my life and can I continue doing it in this place for these people until the end of time? And the answer was no.”

So she saved up for a year, quit her job, sold her apartment, and moved to the Dominican Republic. Now, she lives in a little fishing village on the island’s north coast called Las Terrenas. Unlike other beachside towns in the country, there are few all-inclusive resorts. It’s cozy, and isolated.

Knight can — and does — watch the sunset from her favorite rooftop bar. She gets pizza at a restaurant where you can eat with your feet in the sand. She and her husband live about a five-minute walk from the water with her two feral cats, Gladys Knight and Mr. Stussy.

“I wake up when I wake up. I never set an alarm unless I have an appointment …” she says. “Maybe I sit outside depending on how hot it is, and just kind of wake up and figure out what my day is going to look like. And if I’m working on a book or if I’m working on an article or something like that, I usually get started around noon.”

It’s idyllic — and still incredibly productive. Knight has written two self-help journals and four books since moving here. She’s working on a fifth right now.

‘Why am I doing this?’

It’s a self-help empire that started as a parody. Back when she was clearing out her office at Simon & Schuster, Knight brought home a copy of Marie Kondo’s The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up.

Girl Gone Viral’ Is A Peach Of A Read

Arts,

by Denny S. Brice

Alisha Rai’s Girl Gone Viral tackles the grimy underbelly of social media with humor, satire, pathos, a great deal of family drama, and a positively sizzling romance (also, what may be the best pair of sexy eyebrows in Romancelandia).

These days self-isolation is the norm for many of us, and a good book is an escape that helps us navigate the hours (the many hours) of new-found time. Ironically, Rai’s newest romantic comedy has a lot to do with avoiding people, places, emotions, and family at all costs.We get it, too — protagonists Katrina and Jas make us believers; we’re on board with the reasons why they can’t commit to each other. But we also cheer (rather loudly) for them to find the happy-ever-after they both deserve.

Girl Gone Viral is the follow-up to Rai’s hit The Right Swipe — and yet again, the Internet serves as the backdrop. Katrina King is our reclusive heroine. A former model with an abusive father-manager, she escaped by marrying a kind, wealthy, much older man, who’s left her a widow when the book begins. Still, she’s living her best life, far away from the limelight — and that’s where she wants to stay, private and out of the headlines. But then a social media post about her goes viral, landing her in emotional and physical danger. Her panic disorder means this new, unwanted fame is the worst kind of news — and to make matters worse, the post isn’t even true (which hasn’t stopped others from capitalizing on it).

She and her bodyguard, Jasvinder Singh (owner of the eyebrows, by the way) decide to flee her home base for an isolated haven, which happens to be on the property of his family’s peach farm.

Protagonists Katrina and Jas make us believers; we’re on board with the reasons why they can’t commit to each other. But we also cheer (rather loudly) for them to find the happy-ever-after they both deserve.

Speaking of Jas, he earns his hero chops in spades. He’s strong, silent, and he’ll do almost anything (sometimes to his own detriment) for his client. Anything except carrying a gun, that is — a leftover from his traumatic past. Jas was once a soldier who served in Iraq, and he’s an expert at keeping his vulnerabilities hidden, not only from his client but also from his family. And for the past nine years, his role (and seemingly only goal in life) has been to protect Katrina.

So, as you can tell, Katrina and Jas are peas in a pod: Lots of angst to keep them apart but plenty of tropes to glue them together. But where does the romantic comedy come in?

It comes from Katrina and Jas themselves. Their worldviews (and the author’s voice) make for numerous laugh-out-loud moments, and a romantic comedy where the funny works because the characters are working on the page. We understand them and their motivations, their fears, their hesitancy to give in to love. We also understand why they aren’t wallowing in self-pity because of the traumas they’ve survived.

The story is trope-heavy, however: Forced proximity, secret crushes, office affairs, lovers from different worlds, flirting under fire — you get the drift. There’s also a moment early on when the romance teeters on the tightrope of “why don’t you two just talk to each other?” But Rai astutely adds a fresh layer of complications whenever that feeling surfaces, keeping us turning the pages. Often those layers come in the form of one of Jas’s family members. His stepbrother Bikram, for example, is a treasure: The foreman of the Singh family peach farm, he’s 25, rides a horse, and his general attitude toward his big brother is mature and hilarious.

The story is set in Yuba City, Calif., and Rai includes some historical facts that add a feeling of authenticity — always an appreciated addition to story-telling. The Singh family is Punjabi American, mostly, but with Mexican ancestry. The relationship between Jas and his grandfather, Andrés, known as the Peach Prince of Yuba City, is wonderfully crafted — and rooted in real history. Jas’s great-grandfather married a Mexican woman during the era of the Immigration Act of 1917, which barred Asian immigrants to the United States; California laws at the time also made marriage outside your own race difficult. Andrés explains this to Katrina, describing the relationship between his parents as one of “compromise and love.” Which is a pretty good summation of Rai’s theme here.

Girl Gone Viral is a fun, addictive romance and when the layers kick in, it’s a page-turner you won’t put down. (No spoilers, but the ending delivers on the story promise with a solid twist.)

And by the way, don’t be surprised if by the end of this book journey, you add eyebrows to your list of thirst-worthy features. Just sayin’.

Denny S. Bryce writes historical fiction. Her first novel, Wild Women and the Blues, is coming this year. You can follow her on Twitter @dennysbryce