Man Booker International 2018 longlist
A manic, bruising stream of conscious portrayal of a mother and wife struggling to maintain both a normal life and her sanity.
In a forgotten patch of French countryside, a woman is battling her demons embracing exclusion yet wanting to belong, craving freedom whilst feeling trapped, yearning for family life but at the same time wanting to burn the entire house down. Given surprising leeway by her family for her increasingly erratic behaviour, she nevertheless feels ever more stifled and repressed. Motherhood, womanhood, the banality of love, the terrors of desire, the inexplicable brutality of another person carrying your heart forever Die, My Love faces all this with a raw intensity. It s not a question of if a breaking point will be reached, but rather when and how violent a form will it take?
This is a brutal, wild book it s impossible to come out from reading Ariana Harwicz unscathed. The language of Die, My Love cuts like a scalpel even as it attains a kind of cinematic splendour, evoking the likes of John Cassavetes, David Lynch, Lars von Trier and John Ford. In a text that explores the destabilising effects of passion and its absence, immersed in the psyche of a female protagonist always on the verge of madness, in the tradition of Sylvia Plath and Clarice Lispector, Harwicz moulds language, submitting it to her will in irreverent prose. Bruising and confrontational, yet anchored in an unapologetic beauty and lyricism, Die, My Love is a unique reading experience that quickly becomes addictive.
About the Author
Compared to Nathalie Sarraute, Virgina Woolf and Sylvia Plath, Ariana Harwicz is one of the most radical figures in contemporary Argentinian literature. Her prose is characterized by its violence, eroticism, irony and direct criticism to the clichés surrounding the notions of the family and conventional relationships. Born in Buenos Aires in 1977, Harwicz studied screenwriting and drama in Argentina, and earned a first degree in Performing Arts from the University of Paris VII as well as a Master s degree in comparative literature from the Sorbonne. She has taught screenwriting and written two plays, which have been staged in Buenos Aires. She directed the documentary El día del Ceviche (Ceviche's Day), which has been shown at festivals in Argentina, Brazil, Cuba and Venezuela. Her first novel, <>iDie, My Love received rave reviews and was named best novel of 2012 by the Argentinian daily La Nación.
Sarah Moses is a writer and translator. Her stories, translations, and interviews have appeared in chapbook form, as well as in various journals, including The Argentina Independent and Brick. She is Asymptote s Editor-at-Large for Argentina, and divides her time between Buenos Aires and Toronto, where she's from.
"A touch of David Lynch." --The Guardian
"Celebrating lust and bolshiness with an intensity worthy of Clarice Lispector." --The Times Literary Supplement
"The over-all effect is exacting.... And yet "Die, My Love" isn't truly beholden to plot. The thrill is in the human as animal, and even as parasite." --The New Yorker
"Die, My Love is impressive for the force of the narrator's insatiable rage, which fragments the boundaries of the self. [Anne Enright]" --New York Review of Books
"Unrestrained and unadorned, Harwicz's writing has a wild beauty.... A portrait of motherhood, passion, and mental illness that cuts to the bone." --Kirkus
"We are used to female narrators who occupy one of several familiar niches: blandly 'likeable', 'flawed', or pathological; murderers or abusers who are profiled with just enough sympathy to make us feel humane as we judge them. Harwicz takes us somewhere more profound and forces us to confront the thought that these easy fictional 'explanations' are specious. Lurking inside all of us is the potential for horror."" --Hari Kunzru, author of THE IMPRESSIONIST and GODS WITHOUT MEN
"The prose of Ariana Harwicz embarks on a vertiginous linguistic journey that joyfully shreds all vestiges of common sense."" --María Sonia Cristoff, author of FALSE CALM
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Praise for Ariana Harwicz
"Dangerously addictive." --The Guardian
"A precise, intense, ruthless mosaic that demands we read carefully, never quickly." --Literary Hub
"Celebrating lust and bolshiness with an intensity worthy of Clarice Lispector." --The Times Literary Supplement
"Harwicz succeeds in luring the reader into the darker aspects of the human mind." --Publishers Weekly
"Ariana Harwicz is the real deal, the very definition of an artist."" --Adam Biles, author of FEEDING TIME
"Ariana Harwicz is wet respite from deathless, sexless, bloodless art. "" --Melissa Broder, author of THE PISCES and SO SAD TODAY
"Ariana Harwicz is an intensely passionate and fearless writer whose irresistible prose deserves to be read far and wide."" --Claire-Louise Bennett, author of POND
"A kick up the arse to the literary novel. Feebleminded disassembles form, sensibility, everything... at once a riot (a revolution!) and a headtrip."" --Joanna Walsh, author of VERTIGO and BREAK.UP
"Harwicz achieves an asphyxiating writing, saturated with images of great beauty despite their disturbing character." --El País
"The acoustic quality of her prose, the pulse of her voice, the intensity of her imagery make her subjects so daring, so relentless, so damned and unconventional - very hard to drop or ever to forget."" --Lina Meruane, author of FALSE CALM
"Unrelenting and unforgettable, the Argentine author's latest novel is a breathtaking, hectic ride, as well as a strangely exhilarating story that confirms her as one of the most formidable writers at work today." --Jeremy Garber, Powell's Bookshop
Globetrotting: Your sneak preview of books in translation --New York Times
"This is a novel whose characters's conflicts spill out of the page and into the prose used to tell their story, making for a searing read." --Volume 1 Brooklyn
"Feebleminded is a nuclear bomb of recent literature from Argentina, a book of exceptional power with febrile characters." --Pagina/12
