Little Eyes by Samanta Schweblin, translated by Megan McDowell.

Those of us who’ve spent the last 5 months of lock down cuddled up on the sofa with a beloved pet will understand the pull of the kentuki. Available in a range of animal types, the kentuki is nothing more than a cross between a mobile stuffed animal and a cell phone, and offers a sort of cuddly companionship to the keeper. Requiring no more attention than to be regularly charged, the kentuki seem an easy and fun, if expensive, addition to the household. But here’s the thing: those little eyes contain a camera which links to a screen elsewhere in the world, controlled by a dweller. The dweller can both see into the keeper’s household and move the kentuki around, by virtue of buying a card with a serial number, which when typed into a computer, establishes the connection with the kentuki. Neither keeper nor dweller can specify with whom they want to connect, but the possibilities opened up by this random relationship seem attractive and the kentukis begin to catch on.

This is the premise of Samanta Schweblin’s most recent novel, Little Eyes, longlisted for the 2020 International Booker Prize. If you’re finding it hard to get your head round what’s actually going on with these small toy animals-they could be moles, rabbits, crows..dragons and owls, or a simple and artless plush panda bear– never fear: in the course of the first few chapters the writer explains how they work in enough detail for us to get the hang of it. She also introduces us to the characters who become the keepers and dwellers of kentuki in a spare and succinct prose which gives away just enough for us to see why they’re open to the kentukis. So Emilia in Lima is gifted a dweller’s serial number by her son, forever at work in Hong Kong, to provide a focus and distraction. Aline in Oaxaca, feeling lonely and neglected by her artist boyfriend, Sven, treats herself to a kentuki crow for company. Schoolboy Marvin in Antigua escapes his nagging father, and the gap left by his mother’s death, by becoming the dweller of a dragon in a household appliance shop in a snowy Nordic country. It’s not just loneliness which induces people to get a kentuki: Enzo is pushed into getting one for his son, Lucca, for therapeutic reasons by his ex-wife and the boy’s psychologist. And some yearn to have sight of a country or continent quite different from their own: Marvin longs to see snow, and Emilia, who’s never left Peru, is enchanted by the glimpses of the narrow streets and domes of Erfurt shown her through the window by Eva-lift me up! Lift me up! she thinks.

The stories of these global connections between people and kentukis, between keepers and dwellers, weave in and out through the novel, often leading to interesting and unexpected connections. Emilia develops maternal feelings for Eva, and is protective and suspicious when a naked man appears regularly in her apartment-but she later develops feelings for him herself. Marvin, trapped in the shop window as a dragon, develops a fondness for Lis, the wife of the proprietor and his actual keeper. She appears in his sights by chance, when she cleans the shop each night. Enzo, indifferent to Lucca’s mole at first, is pleased when the kentuki begins to help him in the greenhouse, an activity Enzo finds therapeutic since his divorce.

But of course the very notion of buying a connection and giving access to a person’s home offers carte blanche to abusers and exploitation. We see some of the connections going badly wrong in this way. We also see the kentuki business operating entirely within our own neo-liberal capitalist culture-that is with money making as a driving force and with no regulatory controls. So Grigor in Zagreb, who’s lost his job, devises a Fall-Back Plan. He starts a business assigning connections to customers who’ll pay 8 times more to be able to specify the location of their keeper- very useful for those who’ve always longed to travel to a particular place. Or for those who want to gain access to documents at a particular law firm in Doha. Keen to make the most of it while the field remains totally unregulated, Grigor’s business is constantly expanding. Then there’s Jesper, who liberates Marvin from his shop window, enabling him to see the snow, but also getting him caught up in a pseud0-liberation movement, while devising all sorts of attachments, for which he and the other kentukis have to pay.

So this is a novel really for our times, exposing our loneliness and isolation, our readiness to connect across continents, even with strangers. It also illustrates the way fast moving technology allows people to exploit and abuse others with impunity due to a lack of regulation. As someone not especially interested in technology, I wasn’t sure I’d engage with the ideas here, but in fact I found the portrayal of emotional need, conveyed often just glancingly, in a minor key, so compelling that I was drawn in. The structure of the novel, with the individual story threads remaining separate, of course mirrors the isolation felt by the characters, but does make render a final denouément difficult and I did find the ending, in Aline’s story, a little opaque. Still, the idea of the kentuki and the way Samanta Schweblin develops the narrative is ingenious. And her ability to depict human motivation, behaviour and interaction is spot on, reminding us that this is a world which could be just around the corner. Read and be prepared!