Fever Dream

In the mid-1990s, Argentinian farmers began growing Monsanto’s Roundup Ready soybeans, a plant genetically engineered to survive spraying with the toxic glyphosate herbicide. The country quickly became the third-largest producer of soy in the world, and nearly all the crops exported came from Roundup Ready beans. Growing genetically modified organism (GMO) soybeans promoted copious chemical use with no regulation or education regarding the potential dangers posed by the herbicides and insecticides. Doctors began to report suspicious health trends in rural farming communities, including cancer rates well above the national average, “a range of birth defects that included malformed brains, exposed spinal cords, blindness and deafness, other neurological damage, and strange skin problems,” and “troubling levels of agrochemical residues in the soil and drinking water” (“What the World’s Most Controversial Herbicide Is Doing to Rural Argentina.” Longreads, 2019. Excerpted from Whitewash: The Story of a Weed Killer, Cancer, and the Corruption of Science by Carey Gillam, 2017).

This context is little known outside Argentina, yet it is key to interpreting Samanta Schweblin’s novel. Soy is explicitly mentioned several times in Fever Dream. It is a constant backdrop in the novel, one of the “important things” that Amanda overlooks, an example of danger hidden in plain sight. Health problems that seem unusual to Amanda, a city dweller, are commonplace in the small town. David notes that “around here there aren’t many children who are born right” (157), and he tells Amanda, “Some of them were born already poisoned, from something their mothers breathed in the air, or ate or touched” (151). Carla likewise remarks, “We’re in the country, there are sown fields all around us. People come down with things all the time, and even if they survive they end up strange” (96). On the one hand, from the perspective of a supernatural horror novel, Fever Dream could tell the story of a small town suffering from a strange curse. However, in light of the real-life accounts of health problems related to agrochemicals, the novel becomes a sociocultural critique of soy production and its effect on farming communities.