Samanta Schweblin: Out of Reach

And now I have something extra in my body, something new is switching on or off there, something sharp and radiant.

Dusty roads, a broken fence, empty horse paddocks, scorching heat and lush green horizons planted with soy. The Argentine province a few hundred kilometers from the capital is the setting for Amanda's first encounter—she is fleeing the city with her daughter to seek peace on the periphery—with Carla, an eccentric woman and mother of the mysterious David.

In her 2014 novella Out of Reach, Samanta Schweblin digs her nails into an exhausting and often destructive relationship between mother and child with uncompromising storytelling. The constant transformation of fear into joy and back again, the anxious recalibration of the safe distance that must be quickly crossed if something goes wrong, or simply the weight of not understanding one's own child—all of this unfolds against the backdrop of a parched and remote landscape, so drained that the bonds between people and the bonds to nature cease to function.

The safe distance, as the original title reads, is here equally a metaphor for the thread on which the world barely holds.