Ariana Harwicz - Böcker

Man Booker International Prize 2018 FinalistIn 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 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 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?It’s impossible to come out unscathed from reading Ariana Harwicz. 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 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.

Lisa has lost custody of her young twin boys. Caught between the French legal system’s sluggish bureaucracy and her sinister, scheming in-laws, she’s alone and lost, an Argentine migrant in rural France picking grapes for a pittance, only allowed to see her children in supervised visits once a month. Scapegoated and outcast, destitute and desperate, Lisa decides to take radical action: early one morning, she sneaks into her in-laws’ farmhouse, takes back her children, sets the barn ablaze, and makes her escape. What follows is a white-knuckled road trip that explores human beings pushed to the edge.Clearly, Lisa is not in her right mind, and as Harwicz deftly mingles a chorus of contradictory voices into her very unreliable narration, the reader comes to regard the protagonist with an unsettling mixture of sympathy and suspicion. Written in savage, chiseled prose, Unfit shoots off, a gripping chase that questions all our assumptions—and points out our hypocrisies—about motherhood, custody rights, love, violence, antisemitism, and migration. The latest novel by the acclaimed author of Die, My Love (soon to be adapted to a film starring Jennifer Lawrence), Unfit is addictively terrifying, savagely sophisticated, and shockingly brilliant.

A mother and son inhabit an isolated and increasingly dangerous private world.The third and final installment of Ariana Harwicz's "Involuntary Trilogy" finds us on familiar, disquieting ground. Under the spell of a mother’s madness, the French countryside transforms into a dreamscape of interconnected imagery: animals, desire, the functions of the body. Most troublingly: the comfort of a teenage son. Scorning the bourgeois mores and conventionality of their small town, she withdraws him from school and the two embark on ever more antisocial and dangerous behavior.  Harwicz is at her best here, building an interior world so robust, and so grotesque, that it eclipses our shared reality. Savage, and savagely funny, she leaves us singed, if not scorched.

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.