Staff Pick
Ariana Harwicz has an almost preternatural aptitude for creating fiction that envelops, suffocates, and refuses to relent. Even more feverish than her previous (and already frenetic!) book, Die, My Love, Harwicz’s new one, Feebleminded (translated from the Spanish by Annie McDermott and Carolina Orloff), is a depraved tale of vengeance and mother-daughter dysfunction. 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. Recommended By Jeremy G., Powells.com
Synopses & Reviews
The unraveling of a mother/daughter relationship that is at once chaotic, loving, and mercilessly destructive.
Following the international success of Die, My Love (longlisted for the Man Booker International Prize 2018), Ariana Harwicz again takes us into the darkest recesses of the imagination with this delirious, furious account of a mother and daughter bound by chaos as much as love. Driven to the edge by the men in their lives, they oscillate between erratic bursts of housework, lazing in the garden, and drunken escapades. But is the constant undercurrent of violence all in the daughter’s mind or will they actually go through with their plan for revenge? With a shocking, edge-of-the-seat finale worthy of Thelma & Louise if it were remade by David Lynch, Feebleminded is a wild ride of a novel with echoes of Ágota Kristóf, Elfriede Jelinek and Alan Warner, and will leave you both shaken and begging for more.
Review
"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
Review
"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
Review
"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 Breakup.
Review
"Ariana Harwicz is wet respite from deathless, sexless, bloodless art." Melissa Broder, author of The Pisces and So Sad Today
Review
"Celebrating lust and bolshiness with an intensity worthy of Clarice Lispector." The Times Literary Supplement
Synopsis
The unraveling of a mother/daughter relationship that is at once chaotic, loving, and mercilessly destructive.
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 earned a degree in Performing Arts from the University of Paris VII as well as a Master's in comparative literature from the Sorbonne. She has taught screenwriting and written plays, which have been staged in Buenos Aires. Feebleminded (which has also been adapted for the stage in Argentina and Spain) is her second novel and a sequel in an 'involuntary' trilogy, preceded by Die, My Love (Charco Press, 2017) and followed by Precocious. Her fourth novel, Degenerate comes out in June 2019. Die, My Love was longlisted for the Man Booker International Prize (2018) and shortlisted for the Republic of Consciousness Prize (2018). It has been translated into more than ten languages.
Annie McDermott's published and forthcoming translations include Mario Levrero's Empty Words and The Luminous Novel, Feebleminded by Ariana Harwicz (co-translation with Carolina Orloff) and City of Ulysses by Teolinda Gersão (co-translation with Jethro Soutar). Her translations, reviews and essays have appeared in Granta, The White Review, World Literature Today, Asymptote, the Times Literary Supplement and LitHub, among others. Annie also edits books for Charco Press, including Julián Fuks' Resistance and Giuseppe Caputo's An Orphan World. Her translation of Almada's third novel, Brickmakers, will come out with Charco Press and Graywolf in 2021.
Originally from Buenos Aires and now based in Edinburgh, Carolina Orloff is an experienced translator and researcher in Latin American literature. In 2016, after obtaining her PhD and working in the academic sector for several years, Carolina co-founded Charco Press where she acts as publishing director and main editor. She is also the co-translator of Ariana Harwicz's Die, My Love.