“A Visit from the Chief”
by Samanta Schweblin
from the February 3, 2025 issue of The New Yorker
I am very excited that we have a Samanta Schweblin story in this week’s issue of The New Yorker. If you haven’t read her yet, I recommend you take this opportunity to get to know her, and then move on to Mouthful of Birds, Fever Dream, Seven Empty Houses, and Little Eyes. Later this year, we are getting another collection of her stories called Good and Evil and Other Stories.
Lidia often went to the third floor of the Graziano Institute and sat down on the wooden bench there, right across from her mother’s room. If she arrived after lunch had been distributed, most of the old people would be asleep, and then she could sit and read in silence for a long time with her back to the sun. Sometimes she dozed off, too. She almost never went in to see her mother, who in any case no longer recognized her. But Lidia thought it was important to spend some time at the home every week, just to keep an eye on things. If she stayed long enough, a nurse would come by and Lidia could say hello, ask about any changes in her mother’s medications, and let the nurse know when she’d be back next.
While I have not read the story yet, I know that relatively straightforward, sad opening is deceptive. I promise that it will get strange and sinister before long.
I’m sorry I’m posting this later than usual! If you have comments on the story, please share them below!
The great thing about this story is how it examines the thin veneer that lies between being alive or dead and how they can be so similar or so dissimilar. And the whole question of purpose. Is there any?
Samanta Schweblin sets this out quite nicely in the paragraph, “She wondered what it was all about — that is, what this whole business of living life was even for.” The similarity between life and death gets brought up when the antagonist, Joel asks, “if he (his father) believed in ghosts, in dead people who come back, in living people who go around dead — . . .”
There is a very mysterious vibe that comes through this story being set in Buenos Aries. And it gentle toggles between the real quietly elevating up into the surreal. Which benefits the story quite a bit because what better way to explain how surreal life can be at times. Reality is heightened up into surrealism when so the seemingly unbelievable actually happens.
Some people feel the unseen is unexplainable, yet what someone can feel should never be so discounted that what a person feels is completely ignored as any sort of evidence by the physical only-based rationalist.
This story is religious and secular or sacred and profane without insulting one or the other prospective (depending on your tolerance level) as though meeting in the middle in the words of a widely popular pop tune.
There is also a universal quality to this story because the heroine Lidia and the antagonist Joel are kind hearted to the ones they love most. The metaphor of Lidia being blown about like a fragile leaf is in contrast to Joel’s aggressiveness which makes him seem more in control. And that is a bit disturbing because it casts God or the Chief in an old world perspective as a somewhat self-adoring male and Lidia as being the more docile mindful more easily sensitive and kind female as a kind of primordial weakness.
But it gives the story more of an edge and gets one thinking more deeply about what the point of the story actually is or could be. There is ambiguity here that is welcome because the reader is free to reach their own conclusions.
Many great truths have been found through written fiction or the heightened realism of an observed surrealistic event. “A Visit From the Chief” is a great example. This is one of the best New Yorker short stories in this new year.