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Die My Love Kindle Edition
Man Booker International Prize 2018 Finalist
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 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.
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherCharco Press
- Publication dateSeptember 4, 2017
- File size1512 KB
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Editorial Reviews
Review
Man Booker International Prize (Longlist)
Society of Authors Valle-Inclán Prize (Shortlist)
Best Translated Book Award (Finalist)
Internationaler Literaturpreis (Shortlist)
Republic of Consciousness Prize (Shortlist)
"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
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 Masters in comparative literature from the Sorbonne. She has taught screenwriting and written plays, which have been staged in Buenos Aires. Charco Press has published three of her books, which together form an ‘involuntary trilogy': Die, My Love ,Feebleminded and Tender . 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.
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.
Originally from Buenos Aires and now based in Edinburgh, Carolina Orloff is an experienced translator and researcher in Latin American literature. In 2016, Carolina co-founded Charco Press, where she acts as Publishing Director and Chief Editor. She is also the co-translator of Ariana Harwicz’s novels Die, My Love , Feebleminded and Tender , and of Jorge Consiglio’s Fate .
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
I lay back in the grass among fallen trees and the sun on my palm felt like a knife I could use to bleed myself dry with one swift cut to the jugular. Behind me, against the backdrop of a house somewhere between dilapidated and homely, I could hear the voices of my son and my husband. Both of them naked. Both of them splashing around in the blue paddling pool, the water thirty-five degrees. It was the Sunday before a bank holiday. I was a few steps away, hidden in the underbrush. Spying on them. How could a weak, perverse woman like me, someone who dreams of a knife in her hand, be the mother and wife of those two individuals? What was I going to do? I burrowed deeper into the ground, hiding my body. I wasn’t going to kill them. I dropped the knife and went to hang out the washing like nothing had happened. I carefully pegged the socks to the line, my baby’s and my man’s. Their underwear and shirts. I looked at myself and saw an ignorant country bumpkin hanging out the laundry and drying her hands on her skirt before returning to the kitchen. They had no idea. Hanging out the clothes had been a success. I lay back down among the tree trunks. They’re already chopping wood for the cold season. People here prepare for winter like animals. Nothing distinguishes us from them. Take me, an educated woman, a university graduate – I’m more of an animal than those half-dead foxes, their faces stained red, sticks propping their mouths wide open. My neighbour Frank a few miles away, the oldest of seven siblings, fired a shotgun into his own arse last Christmas. What a nice surprise it must have been for his pack of kids. But the guy was just following tradition. Suicide by shotgun for his great-great-grandfather, great-grandfather, grandfather and father. At the very least, you could say it was his turn. And me? A normal woman from a normal family, but an eccentric, a deviant, the mother of one child and with another, though who knows at this point, on its way. I slowly slide a hand into my knickers. And to think I’m the person in charge of my son’s education. My husband calls me over for a beer under the pergola, asks, Blonde or dark? The baby appears to have shat himself and I’ve got to go and buy his cake. I bet other mothers would bake one themselves. Six months, apparently it’s not the same as five or seven. Whenever I look at him I think of my husband behind me, about to ejaculate on my back, but instead turning me over suddenly and coming inside me. If this hadn’t happened, if I’d closed my legs, if I’d grabbed his dick, I wouldn’t have to go to the bakery for cream cake or chocolate cake and candles, half a year already. The moment other women give birth they usually say, I can’t imagine my life without him now, it’s as though he’s always been here. Pfff. I’m coming, baby! I want to scream, but I sink deeper into the cracked earth. I want to snarl, to howl, but instead I let the mosquitoes bite me, let them savour my sweetened skin. The sun deflects the silvery reflection of the knife back to me and I’m blinded. The sky is red, violet, trembling. I hear them looking for me, the filthy baby and the naked husband. Ma-ma, da-da, poo-poo. My baby’s the one who does the talking, all night long. Co-co-na-na-ba-ba. There they are. I leave the knife in the scorched pasture, hoping that when I find it next it’ll look like a scalpel, a feather, a pin. I get up, hot and bothered by the tingling between my legs. Blonde or dark? Whatever you’re having, my love. We’re one of those couples who mechanise the word ‘love’, who use it even when they despise each other. I never want to see you again, my love. I’m coming, I say, and I’m a fraud of a country woman with a red polka-dot skirt and split ends. I’ll have a blonde beer, I say in my foreign accent. I’m a woman who’s let herself go, has a mouth full of cavities and no longer reads. Read, you idiot, I tell myself, read one full sentence from start to finish. Here we are, all three of us together for a family portrait. We toast the happiness of our baby and drink the beers, my son in his high chair chewing on a leaf. I put a finger in his mouth and he shrieks, biting me with his gums. My husband wants to plant a tree for the baby’s long life and I don’t know what to say, I just smile like a fool. Does he have any idea? So many healthy and beautiful women in the area, and he ended up falling for me. A nutcase. A foreigner. Someone beyond repair. Muggy out today, isn’t it? Seems it’ll last a while, he says. I take long swigs from the bottle, breathing through my nose and wishing, quite simply, that I were dead.
Product details
- ASIN : B07W8TYVPR
- Publisher : Charco Press (September 4, 2017)
- Publication date : September 4, 2017
- Language : English
- File size : 1512 KB
- Text-to-Speech : Enabled
- Screen Reader : Supported
- Enhanced typesetting : Enabled
- X-Ray : Not Enabled
- Word Wise : Enabled
- Print length : 121 pages
- Best Sellers Rank: #370,179 in Kindle Store (See Top 100 in Kindle Store)
- #190 in Absurdist Fiction (Books)
- #291 in Hispanic American Literature
- #691 in Psychological Literary Fiction
- Customer Reviews:
About the authors
Dr Carolina Orloff is a scholar currently working on research projects studying the literature, cinema and culture of contemporary Argentina.
She graduated from the University of York with a degree in English and Philosophy and then received her MA in Literary and Film Translation from the University of Leeds. Her PhD in Latin American Literature was awarded by the University of Edinburgh in 2010. Carolina has published extensively on the writer Julio Cortázar, as well as on Argentinian cinema and translation theory. She is currently a Post-Doctoral Fellow at IASH, University of Edinburgh.
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Customer reviews
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Learn more how customers reviews work on AmazonTop reviews from the United States
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- Reviewed in the United States on May 27, 2018Exquisite and excruciating.
- Reviewed in the United States on November 4, 2021It was not pleasant reading, which is not to say that the book is not interesting. It is not linear, there is no story, the reader is basically inside this troubled woman's head, its disconnected images and random associations, a woman who cannot recognize herself in the roles attributed to her: wife, mother, lover her descent into madness. We don't know what is real and what is delusion. Short sentences. circular, confusing, shocking and disgusting at times. It is crude, raw and anguishing. Couldn't wait to get to the end and would not want to read it over.
- Reviewed in the United States on June 21, 2021This slim, somewhat repetitive book, tells its tale in short, dark chapters, mostly spent inside the head of a new mother’s mental struggles. Somewhat weirdly, there are also two short chapters written from the perspective of a man obsessed with her. Although dealing mostly with depression and violent feelings, the book also has flashes of humor and incisive observations of the people around her. I think the book does a good job taking us inside the main character’s head, but for the most part, inside her head is an unpleasant place to be. Although extremely short (basically novella length), I still feel like if it had been half the length, it would have been stronger, as so many of the little chapters feel very much the same.
- Reviewed in the United States on December 16, 2024i finished reading this today. i'm still unsure of what to say, other than it is being made into a film that will be released in 2025.
the lack of breaks and the intentional missing of certain punctuation made it difficult to remain engaged in some parts. but i'm also not sure how much of that went missing in translation.
the 2018 man booker international prize finalist, 'die, my love' is about a woman teetering on the edge of psychosis. the story follows her descent into madness.
a dark read, indeed.
- Reviewed in the United States on April 15, 2020This book is a portrait of brutal romance. It's less Lynch and more Sara Kane. The writer is definitely drawing from Greek theater in how she colors her protagonist, as with many Greek protagonistas (i.e. Medea, Electra), loyalty lies with the man rather than the offspring. The writer's voice gets a little redundant, but her obsessive unwinding (reminiscent of SDB's A Woman Destroyed) is still gripping.
- Reviewed in the United States on March 26, 2019Read in small doses the book is moderately interesting.The big problem is ,it doesn't work as a novel.It's a decent short story trapped in a bloated novels body.Much of it is confusing and in large doses it descends into numbing boredom.Essentially a mentally ill woman spends page after page telling you she's unhappy.I was sorry about that .But she just isn't all that interesting.
- Reviewed in the United States on March 11, 2018At a certain point I got to wondering "Can everyone relate in some way with the feeling of this book or only some?" and I hope - so, so strongly - that only some do.
- Reviewed in the United States on June 30, 2021This book is first and foremost hard to follow, at some points more than others. I got this book hoping for a truly disturbing read. The first half of the book did absolutely keep my interest, seeing the mental illness and suicidal ideation in myself reflected into someone else, amplified and raging.
Unfortunately, this book lost me in the last quarter. I felt I had no resolution to absolutely anything, nothing had happened, questions unanswered, and I am left completely unsatisfied.
I do not see what other people find so DEEPLY disturbing about this story. Yes it's finally someone talking about post partum depression and psychosis, but nothing happens. Maybe I am desensitized to these things?
Someone please tell me why people like this so much :( I don't get it
Top reviews from other countries
- LauraReviewed in Canada on May 8, 2024
4.0 out of 5 stars written almost like a diary
i got this because i read a review that said it 'devestated them'
i think this would have been a more emotional read if i was a mother or had any level of post-partem. but it was still emotional. interesting POV format - small and short vignettes in a diary-esque format
- ScaramouseReviewed in the United Kingdom on August 30, 2020
5.0 out of 5 stars Connection + Disconnecion = Entropy + Euphoria
This stunning, amazing work of art. A truly exhilarating, terrifying experience. Where myth takes hold of the mundane and penetrates it, suffuses it, unconsolingly. I thought of Ovid's Metamorphoses because of the deeply rooted, precarious and destabilising connection between the heroine, her "normal" life and the animal world that infringes and impinges on her existence. I thought of Bernini's "Apollo and Daphne" because the heroine (if we can call her that, athough she is as much victim as agent) chases while being chased, and is at the same time becoming someone - something - else. And I thought of Ophelia and her triumphant, desolate words: "We know what we are, but know not what we may be."
If you want to read something about the torments of a woman who seems to "have it all" - husband, child, safe existence - and yet cannot (will not) hold onto it; if you are tired of stories where self-deprecating heroines (who really adore themselves) finally meet the hirsute man of their dreams and are driven off in a Lamborghini for a spa weekend in the Cotswolds; if you, as we all do, understand that there is a reality beneath the one we pretend to inhabit, where the natural and unnatural world collide and infiltrate each other, then read this.
The writing is taut as a tightrope (on which our narrator walks), lyrical, maniacal, beautiful, so beautiful. And so deadly. A container ship sailing blithely, so it seems, on the sea of our contemporary world. Until the containers are opened up to reveal the horrors that have been festering within. And that's daily life, folks. Read this astonishing, powerful, unforgettable novella. You will be changed.
-
PaulaNZReviewed in Germany on March 27, 2018
3.0 out of 5 stars Hard to follow. Disturbing
This seems to be the typical bookers prize novel style now. Difficult to read, either due to being written in dialect or like this one, due to its nonlinear, all over the place structure and narration. A story about a reluctant and possibly mentally ill wife who cannot face motherhood, matrimony or monogamy. And on top of all that a very odd style of narration. Not my cup of tea.
- L ChantReviewed in the United Kingdom on September 30, 2018
4.0 out of 5 stars Dark, twisted account of motherhood.
Dark, twisted account of motherhood from a mother who is clearly having mental health issues. Oddly relatable but also a somewhat confusing narrative.
I did enjoy reading it.
- Neasa MacErleanReviewed in the United Kingdom on July 21, 2022
4.0 out of 5 stars A novel version of Sylvia Plath's poems
This is obviously a 'love it or hate it' book, judging by the other reviews here. It is not the traditional novel which would have a range of characters, progress, a plot, a trustworthy narrator and a satisfying denouement. This takes the voice of an unreliable narrator — a woman apparently having a breakdown — who often vehemently dislikes her husband and little son and whose descriptions meander and seem unreliable. She is passive — seemingly out of tune with her rural life, relatives and acquaintances and not expecting to make decisions about her future. The aspect that interested me most was the influence she gains from Sylvia Plath's poems. Her intense fear of men reminded me of Plath's "Daddy" and I found confirmation of her interest in Plath by this sentence: "I put the apron on and chop onion after onion after onion into thin slices until I cut my finger open...". Given the emotional overlap with Plath's poetry, this seems to me a clear reference to Plath's "Cut" which is about cutting her thumb while chopping an onion.
For myself, I need more action, objectivity and analysis than this kind of book. (I read "Die my love" in my book club.) I would not condemn it. There is a growing interest in novels about declining mental health but I found that subject, and this book, too heavy to be enjoyable. On the plus side, I did find some of the writing very evocative — especially the description of the woman's parents-in-law on a bus on their honeymoon. And some of the ideas are strong — particularly the way that we humans are described as animals alongside stags, dogs, rabbits, birds and snakes.