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Little Eyes
Paperback

Little Eyes

$19.99
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They’re not pets. Not ghosts or robots. These are kentukis, and they are in your home. You can trust them. They care about you…

They’ve infiltrated apartments in Hong Kong, shops in Vancouver, the streets of Sierra Leone, town squares of Oaxaca, schools in Tel Aviv, bedrooms in Indiana. Anonymous and untraceable, these seemingly cute cuddly toys reveal the beauty of connection between far-flung souls - but they also expose the ugly truth of our interconnected society.

Samanta Schweblin’s wildly imaginative new novel pulls us into a dark and complex world of unexpected love, playful encounters and marvellous adventures. But beneath the cuddly exterior, kentukis conceal a truth that is unsettlingly familiar and exhilaratingly real. This is our present and we’re living it - we just don’t know it yet.

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MORE INFO
Format
Paperback
Publisher
Oneworld Publications
Country
United Kingdom
Date
30 March 2021
Pages
256
ISBN
9781786078612

They’re not pets. Not ghosts or robots. These are kentukis, and they are in your home. You can trust them. They care about you…

They’ve infiltrated apartments in Hong Kong, shops in Vancouver, the streets of Sierra Leone, town squares of Oaxaca, schools in Tel Aviv, bedrooms in Indiana. Anonymous and untraceable, these seemingly cute cuddly toys reveal the beauty of connection between far-flung souls - but they also expose the ugly truth of our interconnected society.

Samanta Schweblin’s wildly imaginative new novel pulls us into a dark and complex world of unexpected love, playful encounters and marvellous adventures. But beneath the cuddly exterior, kentukis conceal a truth that is unsettlingly familiar and exhilaratingly real. This is our present and we’re living it - we just don’t know it yet.

Read More
Format
Paperback
Publisher
Oneworld Publications
Country
United Kingdom
Date
30 March 2021
Pages
256
ISBN
9781786078612
 
Book Review

Little Eyes
by Samanta Schweblin, Megan McDowell (trans.)

by Ele Jenkins, Jun 2020

Several friends have remarked ‘But that sounds like an episode of Black Mirror!’ when I have explained the premise of this book, which is: people around the world are buying kentukis, the latest techno-craze. A kentuki is a cute plush toy with cameras for eyes and small wheels; it lives in your house like a battery-powered pet. Unlike a pet, each one is connected at random to a human ‘dweller’: somebody, somewhere in the world who has bought a software access code, and can now look through your kentuki’s eyes and control its limited movements.

Samanta Schweblin is not an author who coddles her readers, and the book delivers bleak possibilities immediately: in the first few pages a group of teenage girls attempting to cyberbully a classmate are brought up short when their kentuki’s dweller blackmails them via Ouija board. This vicious opening sets the tone perfectly for a story which balances human cruelty and vulnerability on a knife’s edge.

The story is told as a series of vignettes from keepers and dwellers around the world. A widow in Lima spends her days as a pink rabbit in a German apartment; a divorced father in Italy wonders about the ‘toy’ that appears to enjoy babysitting his son; a teenager in Antigua logs on furtively when he should be doing homework, desperate to see snow. Some characters are sympathetic, some seem unhinged – but their motives are never dull, and Schweblin presents their behaviour frankly and without moralising.

It’s an intensely unsettling read that explores the weird thrill of watching and being watched, as well as the two-edged sword of escapism. It asks why intimacy with an anonymous stranger might seem easier or more appealing than intimacy with one’s own friends and family. It is a book that takes no prisoners: I will be thinking about it for ages.


Ele Jenkins works as a bookseller at Readings Carlton.