Little Eyes: LONGLISTED FOR THE BOOKER INTERNATIONAL PRIZE, 2020 Paperback – 15 July 2020

Technology has invaded our space and minds. With each passing day, we are introduced to life-changing technology that makes a lot of everyday activities easier but also poses a threat to our not-so-well guarded private lives. Through 'Kentukis', stuffed animals with a camera for eyes and connected to am anonymous global server, Schweblin introduced us to a new global dystopian world where people would do anything to avoid being lonely, to the point of reaching out to strangers with their secrets.Schweblin, at the very beginning, gives us a lot of characters across the world, giving us a glimpse of their lives that is occupied by a void, that is being filled with making these long distance contacts for purposes such as entertainment, exploitation and curiosity. The plot doesn't exactly 'thicken' for most of the part, but the author puts across her message through small chapters, well-crafted characters and a pragmatic story that is sure to resonate with the fear most of us hold on our hearts, the fear of being obtruded.'Little Eyes' is very different from 'Fever Dream' that I read sometime last year. This story does not give you enough time to bond with the characters, but the idea of something abysmal happening to the world and these characters reigns throughout, like an ominous cloud. That said, Schweblin also justifies the dark atmosphere with hope, as secrets are revealed and the characters manage to sort through the mess they are now a part of. Yet another book to look forward to, if you are a fan of Schweblin's work. But if you are a newbie, I would recommend you start with 'Fever Dream'.

As others have said here, the concept of the keeper/watcher in this novel is innovative and promising. Unfortunately, it was only promising. Perhaps if the author had limited the wide character roster to focus on maybe 4-5 instead..

I never would have picked up a book like this, but it was part of a 2021 book challenge that I'm doing and it was highly recommended and I'm SO glad I did. It was like nothing I've ever read before. I felt like the characters were well-developed and you were left in suspense a lot of the time wondering what the HECK was going to happen next. A warning about humans and our attachment to technology and our detachment from one another. Powerful stuff.

I was eagerly awaiting picking up this book which certainly looked original enough to pique my interest. It was a book that I polished off really quickly and found it impossible to put down. There seemed to be mixed reviews of this book on Amazon and having completed it, can understand how these might vacillate between 2 and 4 star reviews although I strongly disagree that the book peters out towards the end. Each story recounted through the various chapters seemed to conclude in a fashion where the reader's expectations were often turned upside down.The book is a series of chapters concerning various individuals who have either bought toys called Kentuki's which contain a camera and subscribed to an internet connection to allow people to act as voyeurs into other people's lives. Consumers are split between those who buy the toys for company and those who prefer to have an internet connection was watch the owners. The operator and owner are often continents apart and include school boys, an Italian father battling custody of his son, a school boy in Antigua fascinated by snow and an old woman in Peru who bonds with her German owner who appears to be exploited by her boyfriend. The girlfriend of an artist struck me as the character who least understood the Kentuki and I felt that the writer wanted her character to purvey how people often misunderstand technology. In all cases bar one, the stories are quite harmless but often very profound. The exception concerns some concerning criminal activity in Venezuela and concludes in a fashion which is unsettling. Elsewhere, the stories play upon our fascination to learn about the unknown and also how our perceptions of people's "on line personalities" can be totally incorrect and maybe more about how we wish to perceive them. The writing in clever and the stories are quite perceptive - no only insofar as how the people who own or dwell in the Kentuki's react but also with regard to the population as a whole. What I liked about this book is the perceptions of the characters are often inaccurate and the novel is underscored by a wobbly sense of uncertainty. The one thing that struck me about this book was that it was immediately apparent that it was a translation. The prose is lucid and succinct but the leanness of the writer is a giveaway that Samanta Schweblin was not writing in English and it became clear very early on that Megan McDowell was translating from Spanish. It is an easy read and the writing is of a very high standard. In summary, I felt that each of the little stories reached a satisfactory and often profound conclusion and you sense that ultimately the Kentuki's were destined to be nothing more than a fad. The blurb on the cover about "unimaginable terror" is very wide of the mark and whilst Schweblin's book does remain with you after you have finished the last page, my perception was that a writer like Iain McEwan would have made so much more of this scenario. His recent "Machines like me" covered similar territory and was genuinely unnerving yet "Little Eyes" struck me as concerning technology which is already available. The negative reviews strike me as being unjustified as the book is not really about science fiction but more to do with how the internet has brought the world closer together yet still leads to misunderstandings. Anyone approaching this book with the right kind of expectations will get a lot out of it - those anticipating some kind of dystopian science fiction will find it a challenge. If there is a criticism, it is that the writer had only scratched on the possibility of what these Kentuki could represent and some of the interesting questions she had raised could have been explored further. Never-the-less, this is a novel that fascinates and is far deeper than it;s 240 pages might suggest.

This novella is interesting, sometimes chilling, and explores the hyperconnection that people have allowed into their lives, for entertainment, to fend off boredom, explore new settings by proxy, or sometimes with darker reasons. The 35 interconnected episodes explore all manners of use and abuse of the devices, and by extension, of the people who are linked to them as "keepers" or "dwellers" and who finds their personal flaws exposed in ways they never expected, worse than victims of cyber attacks or phishing.Some characters weave their stories, intertwined but separate, as threads in a tapestry with different colors appearing now and again to form a motif.But the Kentuki machines have big round eyes so the English title is a bit off. It might have been just as well to keep the original title, Kentulkis.

The premise of the book was interesting and topical. But it was too confusing and needed more dramatisation, more thrill. Too many stories, not quite succinct enough. So nearly a brilliant book but it missed the mark.