Samanta Schweblin: ‘In fiction we try not to talk about technology’

Born in Buenos Aires, Argentina, in 1978, Samanta Schweblin is the author of three short story collections, and in 2010 was chosen by Granta as one of the best writers in Spanish under 35. Her debut novel, Fever Dream (2014, translated by Megan McDowell in 2017), won the Shirley Jackson award for best novella and was shortlisted for the Booker International prize. Schweblin’s second novel, Little Eyes, out now in paperback, imagines a reality in which people keep “kentuki” – small, animal-shaped devices with cameras for eyes, controlled by an unknown user somewhere across the globe. She lives in Berlin.

How has the past year been for you?
Very strange. The first months of the pandemic caught me in Argentina: I was annoyed, but those three months were good for me, to sit down, pace myself, reconnect with my work. But at the beginning it was hard, because from one day to the next, the idea of what is fiction and what isn’t changed across the whole world. On day 10 or 15, I remember watching characters on TV hugging their friends and thinking, “This is not possible”. It was the first time in our lifetimes that fiction had such a strong red line that said: this was before and this is after. Writing from that red line is very hard.

Was Little Eyes inspired by a particular device, or concern you had about technology?
I had the feeling, as a reader, that something was wrong between literature and technology. Every author I was reading, even myself writing, we have been putting enormous effort into not naming technologies. In everyday life we have accepted tech in a very natural way, but in fiction we try to not talk about it. I wanted to talk about the relationship we have with others, through technology. Then the idea of the kentuki appeared – it’s a mix between WhatsApp, Twitter, Facebook and mobile phones. It’s everything, so I don’t have to name anything.

Why was it important to show the positive sides of the technology as well as its darker aspects?
We have started to think that technology is something bad, but I think it’s neutral. Technology is not only computers and wifi: it’s the radio, the wheel, books. Each of these can have a good side and a bad side: it depends more on ourselves. In a way, the kentuki is a MacGuffin: I wanted to write very human characters who do exactly what readers would do in the same situation, then suddenly show them how this could be very bad.

Are you secretly hoping that someone who works in tech will start creating kentuki?
I can’t say too much about this, but the rights for the cinema have been bought – so maybe we will have kentuki. I hope not: it would be a disaster … I don’t want to be the mastermind of this horrible thing. But when I first got the idea I didn’t think about a novel, I thought of it as a device: if something as complex as a drone already exists, how could it be that a kentuki doesn’t? It would be so cheap, so attractive, so perverse: a win-win for the market. I went for dinner with my dad and he jokingly suggested copyrighting it, which I didn’t want to do. In a disappointed tone of voice he said: “Well, if you don’t want to earn money, just write a novel, as you know how to do that.”

How is your own relationship with technology and the internet?
I assume I’m normal – I have my mobile phone, I have Instagram, but I don’t use them so much. I don’t have Facebook. On Twitter I follow good reporters – in most of Latin America, trusting the mainstream press might be a disaster as a citizen. Of course, when the pandemic started, Zoom and Skype and WhatsApp became a way to communicate with others. How you feel about these technologies is becoming less important; what’s more important is who you connect with.

How do you think the concept of privacy has changed over the past 10 years?
It has changed, absolutely. We haven’t met before, and I already know what kind of books you have near the couch, what kind of bookshelf you have, where the light comes in your apartment – all these things in a normal life would take us years, even if we had been friends. But now we are obliged to share our space from one second to the other. But it’s still too soon to understand what kind of impact it will have on us.

What can you tell us about the film adaptation of Fever Dream?
It will be on Netflix in October. I was worried, because the strongest thing in the novel is the dark feeling that the narration is cheating you, all the way through. But a voiceover can be dangerous in cinema: it could be boring, the spectator sometimes doesn’t follow it. So doing the screenplay was a challenge. But I’ve seen the result and I’m very, very happy with it.

What books are currently on your bedside table?
I’m always reading a lot of books at the same time. I’m reading Benjamín Labatut’s When We Cease to Understand the World, which is fiction but at the same time a kind of essay. I’ve been rereading the stories of Donald Barthelme, and a book of short stories by Maxim Biller. I’m also reading Chuck Palahniuk’s new novel The Invention of Sound.

Do you tend to gravitate towards a particular type of book?
I’m a big fan of the novella: they are so intense and accurate and precise. I have the feeling that if you write a novella, your main wish is that the reader is going to read it in the two or three hours it would take, without even going to the kitchen to get a glass of water.

What kind of reader were you as a child?
I started with the books off my parents’ bookshelves: Vargas Llosa, Gabriel García Márquez, Juan Rulfo. Then when I started to write furiously around 16 or 17, I came across literature written in English, and I learned to write with these authors. They understood that a novel happens half on the page and also half in the reader’s mind – but what happens there has been very well calculated by the writer.

Is there a particular book or author you always go back to?
Of course Kafka is [always] there. But there are also contemporary authors I read with devotion. I love the work of Elizabeth Strout – she can build characters with nothing, just one line and they are standing in front of you. I also really admire Kelly Link, Aimee Bender, Vivian Gornick, Amy Hempel – reading her was like a hammer in my mind, I had to think everything again.

• Little Eyes is published in paperback by Oneworld (£8.99). To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply