Staff Pick
Harwicz's debut is an agitated nerve cluster of a novel that tangles old school psychological chills with a vicious strain of postpartum paranoia. Each page gleams with an unhinged intensity that's as seductive as it is disquieting, as assured as it is volatile, and as flagrantly contentious as anything in modern literature. A vertiginous descent into domesticity, Die, My Love positively drips with dread. Recommended By Justin W., Powells.com
Synopses & Reviews
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.
Review
"Unrestrained and unadorned,
Harwicz's writing has a wild beauty....A portrait of motherhood,
passion, and mental illness that cuts to the bone." Kirkus Reviews
Review
"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
Review
"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 Gods Without Men
About the Author
Compared to Nathalie Sarraute and Virginia Woolf, Ariana Harwicz is one of the most radical figures in contemporary Argentinian literature. Her prose is characterised by its violence, eroticism, irony and criticism of 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 in Paris earned degrees in Performing Arts and Comparative Literature. She has written two plays, which have been staged in Buenos Aires. Die, My Love is her first novel and the first installment of an 'involuntary' trilogy, followed by Feebleminded and Precocious (forthcoming). As well as receiving rave reviews, it has been adapted for the stage in Argentina and Israel. Die, My Love was longlisted for the Man Booker International Prize (2018) and shortlisted for the Republic of Consciousness Prize (2018). Harwicz lives in France and this is her first novel to appear in English.
Sarah Moses is a writer and translator. Her stories, translations and interviews have appeared 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 her native Toronto.
Carolina Orloff, originally from Buenos Aires and now based in Edinburgh, is an experienced translator and researcher in Latin American literature. In 2016, Carolina co-founded Charco Press, where she acts as Publishing Director and Main Editor. She is also the co-translator of Harwicz's second novel, Feebleminded.