LITTLE EYES by Samanta Schweblin is an eerie novel that jumps through a variety of shorter storylines to explore the implications of a new technology. Kentukis are Furby-like toys that wander around your house as a virtual pet, of sorts. You can own a kentuki and have it observe your life, or you can “dwell” in a kentuki, logging in via iPad to watch someone else’s life through the creature’s eyes. Each kentuki has only one dweller, and when the connection is severed (due to lack of charging or destruction), it can never be recovered. The dweller and keepers can be from anywhere in the world, and the dwellers are anonymous. Sometimes keepers and dwellers reach out to each other, sharing emails or phone numbers, but sometimes not.
I enjoyed this novel’s exploration of internet culture and the conflict between observing and displaying one’s life publicly. Using short, interwoven stories was an interesting stylistic choice, which I did sometimes struggle with (not the author’s fault, so much as mine for being exhausted and distractible lately). I liked how it allowed her to explore the core idea fully, with all its implications for humanity, both good and bad. I also really enjoyed how Scheweblin turned my expectations upside down: what I thought was benign often wasn’t, and what I assumed was sinister, again, often wasn’t. But not always.
Alina’s storyline really hit me full in the chest. I think her interactions with her kentuki reminded me of childhood, and those computer “pet” games. There’s something in a young child that seems compelled towards destruction and cruelty, perhaps acting out the power they lack in their own lives. I remember terrorizing an animated chihuahua, dressing it in ridiculous costumes, withholding what it wanted, calling it a bad dog even when it hadn’t done anything wrong at all, simply because it was tiny and silly looking, and as a second or third grader I was drunk on the power of control I had over its virtual life. My friends did much the same. Perhaps we felt drawn to this horrible behavior because we were good kids who would NEVER treat an ACTUAL animal with anything but empathy. (We felt guilty about it even years after–if you’ve ever played Grand Theft Auto 4, you know that greasy, icky feeling, even knowing it’s all “just a game.” In fact, I wrote an entire fanfiction novel about the implications of moral choices in video gaming via the Thief games cannon.) Virtualizing life allowed us to act out our baser, more ruthless instincts in an environment where no one would be hurt. This was all before the age of the internet, but one can see the implications with anonymous users acting out behaviors they think will have no consequences.
The kentukis make for a fascinating allegory for online life, both the watching/consuming of a stranger’s life and the exhibitionist thrill of displaying one’s life online to anonymous viewers. Alina and Eno’s stories gripped me the most, but Emilia and Eva generated some unnerving feelings, too. I loved the straight-to-the-heart themes of consuming vs. being consumed, controlling vs. being controlled, questions of who truly has the greatest power in such dynamics, and the responsibility we have to one another in that watcher vs. watched dynamic (or, the horrifying lack thereof). The weirdness of this book definitely hit right for me–I love all things strange, and this definitely is–especially the dread Schweblin so expertly conjured throughout by the characters never really knowing who’s watching on the other side. I wasn’t sure if I loved the idea that dwellers and keepers could contact one another, despite the anonymous set-up, but then again, in real life people would find a work around to connect–human’s can’t not.
The one thing I missed–though this is entirely personal taste–was a touch of dark humor. This one is very somber and dark, maybe borderline sour (a flavor I love, by the way) on humanity, and it can drag you down. It’s decidedly minor-key in tone. However, I definitely enjoyed it enough to want to check out more of Schweblin’s work in the future, perhaps Fever Dreams. It really made me think, and I appreciated that the “moral” of the story wasn’t as important as the exploration, thoughts, and doubts it generated within me.