Ariana Harwicz

All style over plot; if you like the style or it interests you then you won’t mind that, but if the opposite is the case then it has little appeal. Personally the plotless novel or novella already starts off on the back foot with me, a couple of goals down before the ball is even kicked. It needs to be fairly special to mount a comeback, meaning I’m open to the possibility and I’ve seen it happen, but in my experience, most don’t make it.

The style here is something of an intense, show more disturbing, transgressive prose poetry. Personally speaking again, when one of the main if not the main selling points of a work is its “transgressiveness” (here that includes mother-son incest) it’s not likely to be of great appeal. Transgressiveness for its own sake, or with no apologies as a fan might rather describe it, to be fair, isn’t something that holds much literary interest for me.

Beyond that it’s a quick-cut deluge of scenes and stream of consciousness that come at the reader without pause, this novella being one long chapter. Some of the prose poetry lines I found very good, but they ultimately get buried in this chonk of text. Perhaps I like work that is more considered than breathless, as well. show less

This was an all-immersive experience into what may at first seem like post-partum depression but which spreads out into a desperate search for freedom and independence. The novella length makes for a compulsive quick read of escalating tension as you wonder what the nameless narrator/mother figure will do next and whom might she hurt in the process. And yet there is humour and love and lust along the way, so it is not as if the journey is all grim and you can actually identify with and hope show more for the best for this anti-heroine. It all ends on as exhilarating a note as Clarice Lispector's "Near to the Wild Heart."

"Die, My Love" is the first of three novellas by Argentinean writer Ariana Harwicz who now lives in France but continues to write in the Spanish of her birth country. The three novellas are considered a trilogy themed on mothers and their children and the 2nd book "La débil mental" is also expected to be translated and published in English by Scotland's Charco Press in 2019. Charco Press is recent publishing house dedicated to translating & publishing emerging Argentinean writers. They have an initial list of 5 titles which is expected to increase by a further 5 books to be published throughout 2018.

My thanks to the Republic of Consciousness Prize 2018 and Charco Press for my Shortlist Perk copy of "Die, My Love."! Best wishes for success with the forthcoming Man Booker International Prize! show less

Nearly every sentence in this novel offers up an image that was either grotesque, or alarming, or disturbingly violent. I haven't been so repulsed by a story since reading Kathy Acker. And that's the point. This novel brilliantly accomplishes what it sets out to do. And the translation I can only call masterful, because the precise words and phrases chosen here for the English transformation of the original Spanish consistently surprised and disgusted me, which is the aim of this work. Can show more words on a page be so disruptively disturbing? Yes, they can be. Even now that I've read the novel I can open to any page and some sentence will brim over with a brilliantly grotesque nugget of turdish perfection.

I'm mulling over why this novel is so much more disturbing and frankly more nauseating to me than the author's previous novel, Die, My Love, when these two novels reach for the same territory of alienation and female fury. All I know is I felt soaring release when I read Die My Love; I identified with the postpartum alienation of its protagonist and rejoiced at her rage. Whereas with Feebleminded I felt like the author was holding my head under and I was drowning in a fetid pool of nihilistic and unhinged madness.

That said, you should read it. show less

Whether you love this book or feel assaulted by it depends on where you situate yourself as a witness to this female narrator's harrowing account of perfectly normal and privileged life in the French countryside. If the definition of 'a perfectly normal and privileged life' has ever felt like a horrifying nightmare to you--if you have ever looked around you and thought, however fleetingly, 'wow, these people, my family, actually think they are behaving rationally, when really they are show more trapped in a nightmare inside their own skulls, and are living a script in which they never question their values or beliefs, and I'm trapped along with them'-- then you'll experience your own alienation, and recognize your own thoughts, while reading this brief testimony of a woman who refuses to look away. If instead you situate yourself, as a reader, outside of her experience, then you'll read this novel as a chronicle of madness, and it will be far less interesting to you.

In an early scene the narrator's husband urges her to look at the stars--he wants her to feel the wonder of them, he insists that she feels what he feels. Her resistance felt so familiar to me. It's the moment when you realize how much of your life is governed by long-held expectations of culture and history and family. Who does not love the stars? Aren't we all supposed to love stars? And yet this woman permits herself to acknowledge, in secret only, that she feels indifferent to stars, and oppressed by her husband's doggish enthusiasm for them. From that point in the story, it's almost as if her inability to feel excited about stars is a deadly insight that prevents her from feeling anything else, just because she is supposed to feel it. Instead of auto-love for her baby, for example, she is absorbed by and obsessed by the lamprey-like truth of being pregnant, of nursing.

The unnumbered chapter that begins on p. 13, of a Christmas dinner with in-laws, is so searing and insightful and scary that I wish I could quote the whole chapter, but here is a little of it:

As soon as all the other had escaped to their rooms to digest their meals, I heard my father-in-law cutting the grass beneath the snow with his new green tractor and thought that if I could lynch my whole family to be alone for one minute with Glenn Gould, I'd do it. Later on I saw him sitting at his desk, going over last month's supermarket receipts. He read the price of each product and then checked the total with a calculator. By the time he'd finished recording the sums in his log of monthly expenses, the desk lamp was no longer giving off enough light. We at dinner, all of us together again, and I can still remember the tired, backlit image of an average man who thinks he's exceptional. show less