Little Eyes - Samanta Schweblin

No one would ever call Argentinian author Samanta Schweblin, who at one point in her career was estimated by Granta to be “one of the 22 best writers in Spanish under the age of 35,” a particularly prolific author. Between 2002 and the present, the author has published just three short story collections and two novels in addition to having stories published in magazines such as Harper’s and The New Yorker. Two of her books have been considered for the prestigious Man Booker International Prize: her first novel, Fever Dream, as a finalist, and her second short story collection, A Mouthful of Birds, as a longlisted candidate. Little Eyes, published in Spanish in 2018 under the title Kintukis, has only now been translated into English by Megan McDowell. 

So what are Kintukis? Well, as it turns out, they are little toy-like animals on wheels that at first glance appear to have been created to amuse small children. But these little guys are a whole lot more than toys. The little rabbits, moles, dragons, crows, etc., all come equipped with cameras and microphones that allow their human controllers to observe, and sometimes manipulate, everything their owners do. In an age when most of us are wondering just how closely we are being watched by our own smart devices – think Amazon Alexa and smart TVs, among other devices – this is a terrifying proposition.

 

Samanta Schweblin 

Schweblin tells her story in a manner that allows readers to observe for themselves several rotating relationships between Kintuki “dwellers” (those who purchase a tablet that controls one particular Kintuki from afar) and Kintuki “keepers” (those who choose to allow a Kintuki into their home) as the relationships evolve over time. The pairings are randomly assigned, meaning that a dweller cannot choose the location of the Kintuki they control, and that a keeper knows nothing at all about the real person following them around. The pairings, too, are largely international ones, giving dwellers (whose tablets all have built-in translators) a distinct advantage over their keepers.  

In short, alternating sections, readers watch budding relationships between people from all over the world (Beijing – Lyon; Lima - Erfurt; Zagreb – Cartagena; Antigua – Honningsvåg, for example) evolve into troubling manipulations, dependencies, extortions, and the like, that negatively impact the real worlds of both the dwellers and the keepers. It may sound farfetched, but is it really? We already live in a world dominated by social media through which “dwellers” burrow their way inside the heads of “keepers” so desperate for approval they allow themselves to be negatively impacted by perfect strangers, sometimes even to the point of suicide.

 

Who can say that something like this is not the next logical step in social media evolution?

 

Bottom Line: Little Eyes is a terrifying glimpse into a future just one or two steps evolved past what the world accepts as perfectly normal today. And that is a terrifying thought.