"Seven empty houses" by Samanta Schweblin

An audio book of short stories.

• None of That - A daughter and mother drive around, go to a house (her mother likes doing this) and get stuck in mud. The mother feels faint. The occupier calls for an ambulance. The mother is envious of the big house and takes a fruit bowl. They go home. There'a knock at the door. It's the house-owner, asking for her bowl back. The mother is burying it in the back garden. The daughter suggests that the woman look around for it, the way people should.
• My parents and my children - A divorced man is meeting her remarried ex-wife and her husband with their 2 kids. His naked parents are in the back garden, cavorting. Later, they can't find the 2 children, only a trail of their clothes. The mother calls the police. As the mother and father drive off in the police car the man sees his parents playing rudely with the children upstairs and says nothing.
• It Happens All the Time in this House - The male neighbour comes round every so often to retreive the bag of his dead son's clothes that her wife had thrown over. The narrator (who has trouble with her son's clothes too?) wonders whether the male neighbour's doing the right thing. She gets the neighbour to hang clothes on a tree. When her son arrives, he collects them up.
• Breath from the Depths - Lola wants to die. She's increasingly housebound. She faints sometimes, and forgets what's happened. She's been married 57 years. Their son has died? A new family move into the street. Her husband befriends the boy. She doesn't trust him - she thinks he's stolen her husband's tools and has burgled a take-away. One night she sees him in a ditch at the end of the garden. He goes missing. He's found dead in the ditch. His mother says that had she phoned about him earlier he'd still be alive. Lola sees him at the foot of her bed. Her husband suddenly dies. Lola tells the boy's mother that her son is braking all her mirrors. At the end we learn that the boy and her dead son had the same name.
  Much the longest piece.
• Two Square Feet - A couple are back in Buenos Aires having been in Spain, staying with the husband's mother who paid for the trip. The wife goes out late to get painkillers for her mother-in-law
• An Unlucky Man - While her sister is in hospital with her parents having swallowed bleach, the young girl wanders, looking for underpants. A man helps, who tells her that he can't tell her his name or a woman will kill him. She gets underparents and nothing bad happens but when they return to the hospital the man is attacked by police and the father
• Out - A woman who lives in the same block where her sister has a studio wanders at night just wearing a robe. She meets a man in the lift. He repairs fire escapes - an escapist. He thinks that when he goes home his wife will kill him, though he intends to go home. She wants to tell him something about her sister but never gets round to it.

I didn't concentrate on this audio book as much as I should have. I like the mood of uncertaintly in some pieces, and some scenarios. None seemed especially successful. Maybe "None of that" was my favourite.

Other reviews

• Nina Allan (in It Happens All the Time in This House ... there is no catharsis; the circularity and sense of stagnation is unremitting, the author’s determination to conceal the full reality of what has occurred making for a story that is oddly static. An Unlucky Man is more dramatically successful and, for me, the highlight of the collection.)
• Gabriella Martin (Many motifs (ambulances, fences between homes, boxes of objects, discarded clothing, lost sons, rotisserie chickens, fainting spells, voids) overlap and reappear in different forms throughout the collection. The stories are interconnected not by plotlines or characters (or, at least, not explicitly so), but by images, moods, objects. The most salient undercurrent in the collection, however, is a meditation on the concept of lack.)