book review: little eyes
Note: This is as much a mini-essay on the book as a book review. There are some spoilers, and the next-to-last paragraph is displayed in white text because of explicit spoilers. If you're interested in reading anyway, feel free to highlight over the white space and you'll see the text.
The world of Samanta Schweblin's novel, Little Eyes (translated by Megan McDowell), is one in which the latest toy craze are kentukis — small, mobile robots that are connected to a random stranger, anywhere in the world, who sees through the kentuki's eyes and hears through the kentuki's ears.
The novel is made up of five stories of kentuki dwellers — those who pay for a connection to see through a kentuki's eyes — and keepers — those who purchase the robot toy and consent to being watched. Enzo, a divorced father raising a recalcitrant boy; Grigor, a young man aiming to make a profit from the new fad; Alina, a young woman in a vacuous relationship; Emilia, an elderly woman gifted one by her distant son; and Marvin, a young boy who recently lost his mother.
And it goes about as well as you'd imagine.
The book explores moments of both tenderness and terror that come with the kentukis and their system — similar to Omegle, the internet platform on which you can sign up to be randomly connected by videochat to a stranger. Neither dweller nor keeper knows who will end up on the others side of the connection, and losing the connection, or letting the kentuki's battery die, means losing the connection forever.
The book opens with a textbook case of stranger danger. Three preteen girls try to enlist their kentuki dweller to help them blackmail a classmate, but when they flash the kentuki to convince its dweller to play along, they themselves are blackmailed. With cases like this, it's difficult to imagine something like kentukis becoming popular.
Yet at the same time, Omegle exists and is free for anyone to use, even children if they lack parental supervision. Parents post videos and photos of their children all the time, exposing them to virality and millions of strangers' eyes. These aren't explicit and encompassing invitations into our private lives, as buying a kentuki would be. But posting our images, personal details, and stories leaves us wide open in a way not dissimilar from allowing a stranger to linger in our bedroom doorways.
Little Eyes seems partly a satire, playing on the way that privacy norms have changed radically in a small amount of time. Just ten years ago, I was learning about stranger danger and cat fishing in health class. My mother forbade me from posting my name and photo when I created my first social media account at age thirteen. Now, my full name, date of birth, photograph, place of work, and school are posted on the internet by my own choice — never mind the deluge of data captured by hundreds of companies, analyzing my every click, watch, and scroll. Notion, the platform where I willingly store my coursework, my blog posts, my reading journal, and even my spending log is not end-to-end encrypted — this means that their team of developers could peer into my account whenever they needed to. Who says things won't change in another five years, to the point where we're inviting strangers across the planet into our homes?
Being a kentuki dweller is easy to understand — nosiness is human, gossip is human, and so is the desire to see how other people live and how other parts of the world look. For keepers, the motivation is a little more complicated. For some, it's about connection. All of the five main characters in Little Eyes are deeply unhappy and lonely people who turn to kentukis, either as a dweller or keeper, to entertain them or give them company. Small moments of intense humanness and longing do occur. "So soft and cute," one character thinks. "She saw its eyelids were closed, and she realized it had been a very long time since she'd seen anyone with their eyes closed. Years, maybe? Maybe since the one time her son had come to see her from Hong Kong, when he fell asleep in front of the TV?"
Schweblin shows how the digital becomes real, and how we imbue it with emotions and meanings that seem ridiculous at first. It's easy to scoff at the characters' emotional investment in their kentukis, much in the way we might see video games, VR, or social media as frivolous. Yet, while I was reading, I became just as excited as the characters as they found community and explored new worlds — became just as devastated at their losses in the digital world as keepers and dwellers.
Marvin, a young boy in Antigua, is enraptured by the snow his kentuki finds in Norway: "If you managed to get out into the snow, and if you pushed your kentuki hard enough against a bank that was nice and white and fluffy, you could leave your mark," he thinks. "And that was just like touching the other end of the world with your own fingertips." Moments like these seemed to say that virtual experiences can be just as powerful as those in-person.
In the same way, Little Eyes shows how virtual bonds can be just as impactful — sometimes more impactful — than the bonds we sow in real life. This is a powerful, hopeful thing, considering our current digital lives — yet it can be incredibly damaging, too. Partly because love and emotions have inherent potential for harm, but also because digital bonds leave too much room for dishonesty or miscommunication.
By the novel's last page, every positive relationship between kentuki and keeper come to an end. And any good that does come out of it — Emilia's motherly feelings, the companionship between Enzo and his kenuki — are either fleeting or facades. These feelings blind the characters to the truths that lie on the other side of the connection.
What Schweblin seems to be telling us is that the virtual world leaves too much in the dark — it is too easy to hide or misinterpret. Perhaps the failed relationships of the dwellers and keepers tell us something fundamental about relationships in general — that the more room there is for deceit, the more likely we are to hurt and be hurt.
Though kentukis can be a route of communication and connection, they don't have to be. The only way a kentuki can communicate with its keeper is through rudimentary signals like blinks for yes, growls for no, though some create ouija-like setups for their kentukis, or even provide their phone numbers to connect with the dweller more directly. But in this world, many choose not to communicate with their kentukis at all. The relationship between watched and watcher becomes more voyeuristic.
This method of "keeping" hints at something I'm interested in — the desire to be seen. I could insert a bunch of commentary on the way that our social lives (less community, less family, more living alone in tiny studio apartments) are emptying of meaning and causing us to search for connection at any cost, but I'm also interested in ideas adjacent to that.
In this case, the desire for a kentuki doesn't come from a desire to connect with another person — it comes from the desire for recognition. Alina, the unhappy girlfriend of the artist, impulsively purchases a kentuki while feeling jealous of her boyfriend's assistant. She doesn't want a friend — she wants a pet, a living thing that will bear witness to her, entertain her, without asking too much of her.
In this way, kentukis remind me of "likes" on an Instagram post. They're so general as to be meaningless; they contain few hints to the viewer's reaction or feelings toward a post. They simply say, "seen." Why is being seen so powerful? Why do we feel the need to be seen, in very narcissistic, selfish ways sometimes?
I think it's affirming. It reminds us that we exist, like looking in a mirror — yet more powerful, because it reminds us that we exist in the eyes of another person. Taking up bandwidth in another person's brain comes with its own little power. It inflates our self-worth as well. It tells us that someone, somewhere, thinks we are worth observing; that our lives have meaning outside ourselves.
And that's something ugly that we don't confront very often. We don't acknowledge that this desire to be seen, to take up space, to mean something to someone exists because it's self-centered. Yet, up to a certain point, I don't think it's a mark of bad character. It's simply a mark of being human. It's something to be recognized and managed, perhaps indulged in occasionally, just like other vices.
In the end, Alina's boyfriend, an artist, becomes obsessed with the kentuki himself. He starts taking it to his studio every day, and Alina becomes increasingly annoyed. She takes out her jealousy and boredom on the kentuki, idly stabbing it with knives and stringing it upside-down on a noose. But at the end of his residency, Alina's boyfriend creates a performative art display. He combines footage taken from the kentuki's eyes with footage taken of the dweller — revealing that Alina was traumatizing a young boy the entire time. While she stabbed the kentuki's eyes with a knife, the little boy sat crying, yet unable to look away. Ultimately, one-way relationships don't exist, Schweblin seems to say, even if we want them to. Dehumanizing another person — through a kentuki, through a profile picture, through a screen-name — can have dire consequences.
Little Eyes is a fascinating but tenuous book, built on a world that perhaps requires some suspension of disbelief. In one moment, a character wonders why dwellers haven't used kentukis to plant bombs or hack Wall Street, and the reader is left wondering that, too. But that aside, Schweblin has created a world both charming and eerie, a world that reflects our hopes, fears, faults, and hearts in high-definition — a prescient reflection of our current world and future possibilities.
Thanks for reading and take care,
—Mia