"Mouthful of birds" by Samanta Schweblin (Oneworld, 2019)

• Headlights - A woman is left by a man on a road leading out of town. She waits. A woman says to her there's no point. The fields are full of other abandoned women.
• Preserves - A pregnant woman becomes anxious, goes to an expert, follows a schedule which includes the extended family. At the right time the relatives collect the maternity presents they'd given her. Her stomach gradually flattens. She finally spits out something the size of a nut which she puts in a flask for keeping.
• Butterflies - Only 3 pages. A father waits at the school gates for his brown-dressed daughter to come out. A brownish butterfly lands on his arm. He tries to hold it but damages a wing. It falls. Prompted by a fellow father, he stamps on it to put it out of its misery. The school door opens. Hundreds of butterflies rush out. They flutter around the parents, who call for their children. The butterflies go off in all directions, the parents trying to catch them. The father still has his foot on the butterfly. The ending is "He can't bring himself to lift his foot from the one he has killed. He is, perhaps, afraid of recognising his girl's colors in its dead wings", which seems rather explicit.
• Mouthful of birds - A mother calls her separated husband to come and take their daughter away. She's eating only live birds. He takes her home and in the end buys her what she wants from a pet shop
• Santa Claus sleeps at our house - Xmas is near. The narrator wants a remote-controlled car. Their mother's depressed. Santa knocks. The father tells him to go away. The mother knows him and takes him to her room for the night. The narrator wonders whether they'll get their car
• The Digger - The narrator arrives at their rented holiday house to find that a man's digging a hole. Somehow it's the narrator's hole, but he can't dig it himself. The locals ask him about it. My favourite piece so far. About 6 pages.
• Irman - Two people on a hot, long drive are thirsty. They stop at an isolated cafe. A dwarf, the only person there, serves them, then tells them he's too short to get drinks from the fridge, or reach food. They find his big, fat wife dead on the kitchen floor. He offers one of them, Oliver, 500/week to work for him. Oliver angrily threatens him. The dwarf threatens them with a gun. They run off with a box that they think contains money. It contains love letters. I like this story too.
• The Test - Someone (42) has to kill a stray dog as a test for a more serious job. They hesitate and are rejected. Will a pack of dogs take revenge?
• Toward Happy Civilisation - a man is stuck at a little train station, unable to buy a ticket because of red tape. The station master and wife look after him. He realises there are 4 others in his situation. He realises that their servility is a sham. Together they plan an escape. They manage to stop the train. Many people get off, grateful that the train has at last stopped. The 5 get on, wondering if the civilisation they've been missing has all come to the little station, leaving their town empty.
• Olingiris - 6 women are called in from the institute's waiting room to a room where a woman - conscious, naked, face down - is lying on a table. With tweezers they each pull out her leg hairs. The woman recalls when she was 10 and saw a fisherman befriend her mother. When she was 20 she's gone to study in the city. She was offered this institute job when she was short of money. When all her hairs are plucked, an assistant collects them all in a bag. The assistant when a girl was interested in fish, her favourite being the Olingiris. Her parents removed her book about fish. Her private tutor secretly got her another. She and her mother moved to town. Her mother died. The assistant finds the lost fish book among her possessions. Surprisingly, it was the same as the replacement book. When the 6 women have left, the assistant compares herself with the depilated woman.
• My brother Walter - the brother's depressed while the rest of the family get happier. They take turns to keep him company. At the end the narrator has a flash of empathy about how Walter feels.
• The Merman - A woman sees a merman on the pier and goes to him. She tells him about her problems. He asks her out. She wants to tell her brother about him but her brother's not interested.
• Rage of Pestilence - Gismondi is doing a census of a border town. He brings food. There seems to be none in the town. The people barely move until they kill him.The ending is "He had let the sugar spill, and the memory of hunger spread over the valley with the rage of pestilence".
• Heads against concrete - A boy who smashed a boy's head against playground concrete (because of a girl) became a famous artist who depicted heads against concrete. A Korean dentist want him to do a painting clearly showing a tooth, but the artist has other idea. He gets worked up about cultural gaps and smashes a random Korean's head against the pavement. I'm puzzled.
• The size of things - Duvel, rich, lives with his mother. The married narrator inherited a toy shop. He's in debt to Duvel, who buys a model kit each week. One day Duvel asks if he can stay in the shop - his mother's locked him out. He agrees to help organise the stock. Overnight he sorts items by colour. The shop becomes popular. He begins to hide toys he tires of - model kits, then puzzles. Sales begin to slip back. Then his mother turns up and drags him away. I was hoping more would be made of the contrast between the wife and the mother. Why mention the debt?
• Underground - After a long drive the narrator sees a truck stop. An old man there tells him a story about a village where a bump in the ground formed. Kids dug there for days. One day they all disappeared, along with the hole. Parents started hearing noises from the ground and began digging holes. The driver continues his journey. The old man says h"We're miners".
• Slowing down - Tego used to be a human cannonball in a circus. The narrator used to light the fuse. Over breakfast he worries that he's slowing down. He gets up and dies. A few days later a journalist visits. The narrator tries to light the stove several times to make coffee but it doesn't work. 3 pages.
• On the steppe - The narrator, Ana, and Pol live miles from the nearest town. While Pol's away she tries cranky fertility suggestions. They go out in the night hunting for something. Pol meets a couple who have found something. The narrator and Pol go to them for a meal. They want to see it. The couple's reluctant. Pol goes to the toilet, looks in another room, gets attacked. He run out of the house with Ana, straight to the car. He drives past their house, fast, risking a collision with something.
• A great effort - A father dreams of his father. He goes to Mrs. Linn - there's a woman like her in each neighbourhood - a massager/therapist. His father had left home a few times. His son puts on a puppet show for him, the puppet screaming. The father's worried that his son's somehow suffering from how the father was raised. He wants to break the chain so he picked up his father, and drove him out of town. He wanted his father to leave permanently, but he didn't. So he took his father to Mrs. Linn. It seems to work.
• The heavy suitcase of Benavides - Benavides kills his wife of 31 years, puts her body in a suitcase and goes to his doctor at 2.30am. His apologises at first for imagining he's killed his wife. The doctor puts the suitcase in the garage and doesn't let Benavides leave the house. Benavides is prevented, sometimes violently, from retrieving his case. Dr Corrales thinks of it as an art installation, with Benavides part of the show. He invites people to the opening. It's a success.

My favourites are "The digger", "Irman" and "Toward Happy Civilisation". The others often have interesting detail, symbolism or plot, but not always all of those features. Coetzee wrote that "The Grimm brothers and Franz Kafka pay a visit to Argentina". There's some Borges too.

Other reviews

• Daniel Hahn (these aren’t narrative twists, so much as persistent underminings. ... “Headlights” [...] is one of the best ... There are plenty of transcendental connections between people and animals or objects ... but definite connections between people are in shorter supply ... Well over half the stories draw their emotional charge from a deeply troubled relationship between a parent and a child. )
• Michael Shaub (some authors seem to be in love with their own quirkiness, but Schweblin writes about even the oddest situations with a self-assured confidence; she never winks at the reader or revels in her own cleverness)