If you grew up feeding your key-chained Tamagotchis oranges and cups of milk between science and gym, scooping their digital poops before they asphyxiated in the stink, give Samanta Schweblin’s Little Eyes a go. If you’re ready to hate Roombas for the rest of your God forsaken life, then this book is also for you. 

In its original Spanish, Schweblin’s novel is called Kentukis, “kentuki” being the invented, ambiguously docile term for the animate robot creatures on wheels that are central to the text. A kentuki is a stuffed animal toy, something like a Furby, though the former can’t speak and can be any number of creatures—rabbit, crow, mole, panda, owl. Kentukis have cameras behind their eyes and embedded microphones that allow them to listen to their surroundings, and, for $279, they’re on sale all over the world.

Sold separately are “kentuki cards,” which each have a serial number matching only one kentuki; the two halves of the connection might be continents apart. A card buyer can input her serial number in a tablet, remotely allowing her to control and experience the world through the kentuki that matches her code. Thus, purchasers become either dwellers (which I think of as viewers—those who inhabit kentuki bodies, feigning pets in homes) or keepers (the viewed). 

The novel moves its third-person narration from city to city with each chapter, sometimes circling back to the same characters repeatedly, sometimes leaving characters behind. When I think of novels I love, most have plots that can be described in two words: “nothing happens.” Little Eyes, though, is a novel of ceaseless action—so much, indeed, that on-page reflection occurs in only, let’s say, six sentences of the entire book. The text whirs like the motors of its little robots. 

An older woman in Lima operates a kentuki bunny in a young woman’s home in Erfurt with care, imagining the younger to be like a daughter, trying to protect her from an awful boyfriend. 

The French keeper of a kentuki bear arranges mirrors at floor level so the man who dwells in it from Beijing can see his animal form, but she maintains strict rules about his movement around her apartment.

A young boy in Antigua leaves his real world for a while—a world in which his mother has died—to inhabit the small animal body of a dragon in Honningsväg, seeking out snow, a miracle the boy has never seen at home. 

Instead of the in-text meditation that I’m often drawn to, Schweblin utilizes something poet Michael McGriff calls the image list to make a novel that feels, ultimately, like an uncanny caricature of all of its stories. She stacks images for some 250 pages, leaving a reader overwhelmed with a collage so dense that she forces us into off-the-page meditation that will last much longer than the book does. (Three years after my first read, I still think of kentukis daily.) 

The English name for the novel, Little Eyes, digs directly at the horror but, perhaps, also the tenderness in the book’s whole premise. Some kentuki relationships are beneficent, infantile, or martyring; some are, of course, dangerous or vitriolic or grotesque. In each, two people are allowed to imagine they understand the other and that they’re understood. Though the system rarely provides either outcome. Mediated through a stuffed toy, it relies upon voyeurism and preferences projection over reality. 

When I texted my mom to ask if she remembered Tamagotchis, she wrote right away—I remember them. Little fuckers had to be fed. She wrote—They died a lot. Lots of pre-teen drama. 

Of course. Because we girls were learning about the maternal: age eleven and enrolled against our will in It’s Perfectly Normal, a puberty class at school based on a textbook by the same name. Our middle school never had us pair up with prepubescent boys over a bag of flour wearing googly eyes, but we cooed at our Tamas all by ourselves because they made us grown-ups in all the ways we’d been taught to want to become. The boys (who were taught that masculinity meant control) made a game of stealing the little keychain creatures and shutting them away in lockers or in the men’s bathroom while they chirped their starvation. 

We were all just trying to make something, even just a few pixels, that would owe us life and love us well. Every time the skull beeped onto the screen to show us our failure, that our Tamagotchi was dying, the world ended a little. 

Both of the gendered ways children learn to perform in order to earn unconditional love are Sisyphean and damning. But much of what we learn we never grow out of. And Schweblin takes the human desire for permanence and closeness and worthiness as a model to develop something monstrous.

In the text, no one can control who they connect with via kentuki. But an entrepreneur in Zagreb operates black market kentuki sales, establishing dozens of connections and then writing up descriptions of the homes his tablets are linked to. He sells to those who wish to be tourists in the homes of specific types of families—wealthy buyers who wish to dwell in kentukis that sit in homes of the poor or, perhaps, those who wish to peep anonymously into homes filled with kink and queerness. These examples come from my own mind, not from Schweblin’s text. She only has to give one example: the entrepreneur sells to a stranger a kentuki in Kolkata, whose animal body charges each night next to the bed of an unknowing little girl. I can imagine the dweller is a mother who lost her own child or a pedophile, but I have to imagine something, which is the novel’s magic. As each of the characters literally has to buy into a kentuki relationship, any reader must figuratively do the same with Schweblin’s work. She lays out some possibilities of the world she’s created, but we have to fill in what’s missing and make sense of what’s present. 

I often forget the details of books, but time and again I find that the specificity of this active philosophical horror present in so much Argentine fiction (think Mariana Enriquez, Silvina Ocampo, Pola Oloixarac, Roque Larraquy) hooks into me and remains there—forcing tissue to heal around and incorporate it. Samanta Schweblin is this element’s greatest master. She shoves a hollow needle and then a sparkly earring through my own loneliness, my own addiction to performance, my longing. Her books ask my body to accept the change. 

I’d be—of course I’d be—a keeper in Schweblin’s world, someone who lives with a kentuki, not one who controls it remotely. I’d want to be seen instead of to see. I’d want to trick myself into imagining I have, as with a pet or a Tamagotchi, a bond unconditional and true. 

“A keeper doesn’t want to know her pet’s opinions,” a woman in Oaxaca muses, a rare glimpse into a character’s internal world. Yes. She has me there. 

Schweblin writes of a mother who forces a father in Perugia to adopt a kentuki for their child after their divorce, a pet to love and comfort the boy. The kentuki mole follows the child all over the house, a dedicated guardian: coming to get the father when the boy falls asleep while doing homework, “pushing a stray sock from the kitchen to the bedroom,” or “patiently, one by one,” collecting candy wrappers he leaves about. 

As the child in such a household, I know I’d comfort myself by clutching my soft sheep or feathered bird, imagining it knew me, someone knew me, perfectly. I’d not be able to stand thinking about the real person on the other end of the connection, watching with their own motive, making up their own story. In the Italian boy’s case, the adult man controlling his pet mole seems (in a haunting and ambiguous twist at the end of the novel) only to have ever meant him harm. 

The hope in Schweblin’s text is in the fact that the reader doesn’t ever get to be passive, as the characters can be—as I’ve said I would wish to be. Her images are dominoes that force us to conjure more and more of the world all the time rather than shutting it out. Inherently, then, by reading Little Eyes, we have to fight off the horror of its premise.

In 2021, while one of my oldest friends was away at a chemotherapy appointment, I set a Roomba free in the apartment she leased short-term, close to the hospital in Denver, when she was diagnosed with lymphoma at twenty-six. Dust and hairs piled up in the wood floor’s corners. Rings of tea collected around half-empty mugs on side tables. The fluff from the hundreds of balls of yarn that came through the mail clung to the rugs, remnants of gifts from those who cared about Peanut and didn’t know what else to send.

To protect the plants’ leaves from the vacuuming whir, I ran ahead of the machine, building walls with Peanut’s shoes around the gifted ivies that vined in every corner and the philodendron the size of a twin mattress in the middle of the bedroom. Mostly, Peanut slept for six months on the couch. 

The website of iRobot (parent to the Roomba) asserts that “it typically takes three (3) to five (5) cleaning missions or Mapping Runs to generate a fully developed Imprint™ Smart Map” of a space. Furby toys, too, were programmed to “learn” on a schedule: switching from speaking only “Furbish” to peppering their squeaks with English words over time. Many Furby parents thought the creatures could actually learn, teaching children swear words and foul phrases. They couldn’t. Like Tamagotchis were programmed to die sometimes without cause, Furbies were programmed with a finite number of English words that they’d use more and more over time to imitate language acquisition and instill their caregivers with pride. 

Roombas, some twenty years on, can learn. They ram their bodies into obstacles only a few times before having collected enough spatial data to skirt them precisely on every later pass (and soon, they’ll share what they know with a certain behemoth-corporate-monster-from-Hell). 

Each time the Roomba left one room of Peanut’s apartment to examine the next, I moved the plants and the shoe towers to new spots. I didn’t want it to get a good sense of this world, our world. I wanted to protect her from the dust mites and from being seen. Myself, too. 

I screamed into the empty apartment when the Roomba got too close to me. 

I hate Roombas, which trade in cleanliness instead of the supposed or imagined tenderness that kentukis do. Schweblin makes me hate kentukis too—objects that exist, ultimately, only to play out the worst and best of humanness. She makes me love them for the same reason, for their moments of kindness and for the ways that they lay bare compulsion, rage, and raw need. 

In Schweblin’s Oaxaca, someone makes an art exhibition of the footage from a woman breaking off her kentuki’s beak and gluing it back over the camera lens in his eyeball. The artist doesn’t explain, much like Schweblin doesn’t, but I have to imagine, with rage, a person kicking her dog. We know, in the text, that a child dwells in that bird — that he cries and cries, not understanding why his keeper doesn’t love him. 

But it’s also in Schweblin’s world that an older woman dweller from Ravno figures out the address of her kentuki keeper in Hong Kong and sends an ice cream cake to every apartment in the building to wish him a happy birthday. The man gushes on the phone to his mother about his kentuki and the maternal figure inside it. His mother, though, jealous (and a dweller herself, controlling a rabbit in Germany) doesn’t understand. 

“Her son would rather be a keeper than a dweller? That is, he would rather have than be?”

Sometimes being is too much to ask—being and seeing one and the same. 

In the cold of a Colorado winter, I was pulling Peanut’s clumped hair from the shower drain; I had equal need to be witnessed by anyone at all and to disappear in the way that care work can disappear a person, girl fading into the background as her pixelated Tamagotchi baby grows from egg to child, from child to adult. 

I might’ve let the Roomba loose from its charging station, but I sure as hell trapped it in the closet later and let it bang against the wall for the five minutes that I gave myself to cry in the other room. And then I also returned it to its dock—a kentuki connection, after all, ends permanently if a keeper lets the animal’s battery die out. I waited for its pulsing yellow charging light to illuminate. Because I cared for it. Stupidly. In spite of myself. Or maybe because, for a moment, I let it be something close to who I am, and I gave it what I would’ve liked to have given myself. 

With Little Eyes, Schweblin grants readers permission to feel the desires at the underbelly of human ugliness and also the big, bracing connection that cuts against thick bounds of what machinery deems possible. I have remembered it often (sometimes with hope and sometimes with trepidation) when my primary feeling is aloneness. Because it’s a book that tells me I’m not—not ever—that.