Two kentukis, when activated in a Barcelona nursing home, commit what can only be called mechanical suicide. Enzo, though aware that his mole’s dweller has been phone-stalking his family, cannot bring himself to break the connection. Emilia grows protective of her keeper, threatening the woman’s boyfriend. Alina’s malevolent behavior arises from a moment when she believes her crow has violated her personal space.

Even moments of innocent affection between keeper and dweller cast shadows of possibly hidden intentions. It’s the sensation of being simultaneously led astray and lured into a trap. In Lima, Peru, Emilia, an older woman, inhabits a pink and white rabbit in Erfurt, Germany, and loves the idea of being loved by her keeper, to disturbing ends.Įach of these connections unfolds with a sense of uncanny foreboding, like the feeling of walking down a dark hallway without a sliver of light. In Antigua, Guatemala, a boy named Marvin becomes a dweller to a dragon kentuki in a shop window in Honningsvåg, Norway, until one day he finds himself released into the world, part of a kentuki liberation movement. In Oaxaca, Alina acquires a crow as an amusing diversion while accompanying her artist boyfriend to a residency, but she grows to resent the pet and inflicts various types of harm upon its furry body. In Umbertide, Italy, Enzo becomes the keeper of a mole with whom he believes he shares a friendship, until he realizes the dweller has developed an unhealthy obsession with his son. Though the kentukis cannot speak, keepers and dwellers devise their own methods of communication, and the scenarios that arise from these new languages and relationships are both endearing and chilling. But the twist is that their controlling consciousness is human rather than algorithmic. It’s an eerie but not unfamiliar premise: You invite a small machine into your home that watches, listens and responds to the way you live. The connection can be broken in a number of ways, but the severance is irreversible. Hopping among more than a dozen countries and characters, “ Little Eyes” tracks the rise of robotic stuffed animals that are bought and cared for by “keepers” and controlled remotely by “dwellers.” When the animals - or “kentukis” - are turned on, each is connected to a single person somewhere in the world who has purchased a serial code in exchange for receiving a literal lens into its keeper’s life. Samanta Schweblin’s latest novel enacts both those meanings. The etymology of the word “dwell” can be traced to the Old English dwellan, meaning “to go astray.” But somewhere along the way, dwell came to mean “to remain for a time,” trading in one kind of entropy for another.

Little eyes novel