Matate, amor

Trilogía de la pasión #1

by Ariana Harwicz

Matate, amor es un thriller campestre. Todo ocurre en la casa con salida al bosque donde habita un ciervo y una familia, ella + él + el bebé, tres, aunque más bien dos contra una, ella, que los espía con un arma blanca en la mano o con una escopeta en desuso que todavía no ha dicho su última palabra.

El contacto con lo salvaje de la naturaleza que rodea a la protagonista y de los vecinos a los que acecha, pero también del desbordamiento de su deseo, de su oscura ansia e incluso de la pulsión de implorar a su marido: matate, se convierten en los elementos nucleares de esta arriesgada, contundente y honesta novela.

Genres: Fiction, Contemporary, Literary Fiction, Mental Health, France, Novels, Spanish Literature

152 pages, Paperback

First published November 8, 2012

About the author

Español/English
~~~
Ariana Harwicz nació en Buenos Aires en 1977. Estudió guión cinematográfico en el ENERC (Escuela Nacional de Experimentación y Realización Cinematográfica), dramaturgia en el EAD (Escuela de Arte Dramático) y completó sus estudios con una licenciatura en Artes del espectáculo en la Universidad Paris VIII y un máster en Literatura comparada en La Sorbona. Matate, amor, es su primera novela.
~~~
Compared to Nathalie Sarraute, Virginia Woolf and Sylvia Plath, Ariana Harwicz is one of the most radical figures in contemporary Argentinian literature. Her prose is characterized by its violence, eroticism, irony and direct criticism to 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 first degree in Performing Arts from the University of Paris VII as well as a Master’s degree in comparative literature from the Sorbonne. She has taught screenwriting and written two plays, which have been staged in Buenos Aires. She directed the documentary El día del Ceviche (Ceviche’s Day), which has been shown at festivals in Argentina, Brazil, Cuba and Venezuela. Her first novel, Die, My Love received rave reviews and was named best novel of 2012 by the Argentinian daily La Nación. It is currently being adapted for theatre in Buenos Aires and in Israel. She is considered to be at the forefront of the so-called new Argentinian fiction, together with other female writers such as Selva Almada, Samanta Schweblin, Mariana Enríquez and Gabriela Cabezón Cámara.

Reviews

[Ilse · Rating 3 out of 5]

Motherhood, marriage and madness

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.

Die, my love intrigues by its title alone and Ariana Hardwick not for one single moment releases the firm grip she puts on the unsuspecting reader, masterly evoking an unfaltering tension and sense of premonition that bad and ugly things will happen - a grip so tight that she made me wish to drop the book out of fear to encounter horrific mental images I couldn’t unread and unable to stop at the same time.

In what reads as a rural anti-idyll set in the French countryside, the reader enters the mind of a woman who cannot cope with the needs of her baby because she is struggling with the terrors of mental disorder. The causes of the narrator’s mental breakdown are not revealed. Rootlessness is suggested (the mother is not French). No possible clue is given why the woman derails from reality and when such started: is it a post-partum psychosis, or did the birth of the child trigger issues that were already present but dormant? There are indications that her fragile mental condition was already there before the marriage and the child. The wrecking effect on her family is more obvious. She never wanted the child. Rage is the prevailing emotion, the relentless stream of consciousness reflects aggression, self-harm, the impossibility to distinguish hallucination from reality.


(Jeannie Tomanek, A thousand cuts)

Motherhood, Adrienne Rich wrote in 1976, is the suffering of ambivalence. As far as I assume such is a thought that many can relate to, I am not sure if I would reckon Ariana Hardwick’s contribution to the debate as one that feels courageous, original or necessary in what came across as a rather run-of-the-mill attempt to demythologize the joys of motherhood and emphasize the negative effects of it on the lives of women. Sure, there are moments the narrator brings Emma Bovary (and her boredom, and escape into adultery) to mind, and her longing for a break in the company of a book instead of her baby might touch a chord, but as a view into the hell that the mind can turn into, her writing didn’t pierce me on a level that matches this thorny subject, despite her hallucinatory imagery which seems to aim at an intensity and brutality expressed in a visceral rage mixed with sexual desire which reminded me of Raduan Nassar’s A Cup of Rage.

Apparently there is a film adaptation in the making, by Martin Scorcese. Yet, just like I never had the nerve to watch Betty blue (based on the book 37°2 le matin), I think it would be wiser for me not to watch it and to read The Shutter of Snow by Emily Holmes Coleman instead.

[Robin · Rating 5 out of 5]

I've been needing the loo since lunch but it's impossible to do anything other than be a mother. Enough already with the crying. He cries, and cries and cries. I'm going to lose my mind. I'm a mother, full stop. And I regret it but I can't even say that. Who would I say it to?

This book is the antithesis of one of those nauseating Anne Geddes photos, of an eternally adorable, sleeping infant, nestled inexplicably in a costume so that they look like a pea in a pod. Urg... pardon me as I retch.

Where was I? Oh yes, the opposite of Anne Geddes. Because Anne Geddes is the biggest liar out there. About motherhood, about babies, about what I want to look at, framed on the wall. Ariana Harwicz, on the other hand, tells the searing, brutal truths of the dark, inner, mostly unuttered experiences mothers have, none of which are socially acceptable. Who ever says "I regret having my baby"? Who can admit aloud that they wish physical harm on a defenceless toddler? Who dares confess they have felt that way, even in a difficult and fleeting moment?

Harwicz' story is like a big, horrific reveal. Ta-da! The infant you're carrying is going to carry off YOU... your freedom, your body, your relationship, your identity... and you have to love it! Every minute of the day! Stifling any feelings to the contrary. Photographs with smiling faces hiding the inner madness.

This book gives voice to a mother's secret protests. I was almost afraid to turn the page at times. What is going to happen NEXT? The protagonist is on the razor's edge of insanity, full of contradictions. She is trapped and clingy at the same time. It's unclear sometimes what is real and what is imagined, but the effect is a claustrophobic fury, of claws scratching against splintered wood, of agony and alienation. But in that, Harwicz unleashes a freedom by uttering the totally unacceptable, in telling a story without sanitising one single word.

There's something of Sylvia Plath here, of The Yellow Wallpaper, of Surfacing, of every mother who has felt the desperate loss of self. The writing is powerful and dense, so I took my time reading this, treating each short chapter as I would a poem. It's not for the faint of heart (thank goodness it's only 123 pages) but it gives permission to acknowledge these dangerous yet universal feelings, and I think that can only have healing consequences.

[Jim Fonseca · Rating 4 out of 5]

(Edited 9/12/22)

Die, My Love, translated from the Spanish, is not a book for everyone. It’s unsettling to say the least. The author puts us inside the mind of a severely mentally ill woman who has an infant. She lives with her husband and mother-in-law who is recently widowed.



The woman exhibits so many bizarre behaviors we have to wonder if the adults around her are at fault for not having her institutionalized. (Although for a time, she is, but she gets better and is released.) While at the institution she plays along: “I said hello to everyone and even asked their names. Normally, I don’t care what people are called, what difference does it make?” When the counselors ask her what she sees in the mirror she thinks “I don’t need to look at my reflection to know I’m a piece of shit.”

Some examples of her behavior: The woman keeps a knife hidden in the garden, takes the child out there, plays with the knife, and dreams of harming the baby, herself or her husband. She has access to a gun and at one point shoots and kills the family dog for barking. (The husband gets another dog.) She deliberately runs through a sliding glass door and is hospitalized. She takes the baby out in the woods until dark and hides from a neighborhood search party. She likes to make scenes in public and she has rages where she tears doors off cabinets.

She is having an affair with a neighbor who has a wife and kids. Are they all in danger from her? The ill woman tells us she envies her widowed mother-in-law because she knows the older woman will soon kill herself.



We read and see a bit about her sex life: “I like thinking about sex, not having it. I was always good at the theory and a failure at the practical bit…”

It’s disheartening to hear the woman tell us several times that she has no love for her baby. She tolerates him at best and she is jealous of the good times that her husband and the baby have playing together. I saw in a review of this book in The Guardian that one reviewer said the book was about post-partum depression. I’m not a psychologist, but in my opinion, her illness is way beyond anything that could be categorized as “depression.”

The author does a good job of keeping up the tension of what this seriously ill woman might do next, and as the end of the book nears, we know it won’t be pretty.



The short chapters are mostly one paragraph with little dialog, which helps add to the tension being created. The author is from Argentina and did her university work in France. Die, My Love is her first novel. Her most recent one, Feebleminded, was short-listed for the International Man Booker translation prize.

Photos of Argentine towns: Top, El Chalten in Santa Cruz province from istockphoto.com. Lower photo of Tafi del Valle, Tucuman from alamy.com
The author from cloudfront.net

[♑︎♑︎♑︎ ♑︎♑︎♑︎ · Rating 5 out of 5]

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 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.

[Doug · Rating 1 out of 5]

"I'm barely listening. I don't understand his metaphors. It must be that I don't have the brains for it. My mind is somewhere else, like I've been startled awake by a nightmare." p. 82

Nice of the author to provide me with a review of her own work within its pages! :-)

My main problems with this book were three-fold:

1. The book is basically one long rant by a woman undergoing post-partum psychosis, with little in the way of plot or character development... there was nothing really in the final 118 pages that I didn't already 'get' from the first 5.

2. Although some of the language is poetical, with some striking imagery (even in translation), a large portion of the book is written in an intentionally surreal screed, that I would go back over and over several times before giving up on any tangible meaning ... and moving on.

3. I have a very low threshold for animal abuse of any kind, and the unnecessary killing of a dog halfway through almost caused me to abandon the book. I could take the whack job ignoring her poor husband and child ... and masturbating incessantly.... but don't shoot a poor defenseless creature, you bitch!

[Jaidee · Rating 1 out of 5]

1 "semi brilliant but vile arrogance through and through" stars !!!

I am throwing in the bloody, shit infested towel in the incinerator. Despite this being a short book I am stopping at 58 percent.

Each sentence is a carefully cut synthetic garnet but she has strung them together with vomit dipped string.

What might have been an insightful contribution to bipolar psychosis lived experience is instead a vile egotistic masturbatory lovefest of the author's ode to her- self.

Fuck a duck...oh she already has?!

[Gumble's Yard - Golden Reviewer · Rating 5 out of 5]

NOW LONGLISTED FOR THE MAN BOOKED INTERNATIONAL FOLLOWING ITS SHORTLISTING FOR THE REPUBLIC OF CONSCIOUSNESS PRIZE

Charco Press is a newly established small UK publisher which “focuses on finding outstanding contemporary Latin American literature and bringing it to new readers in the English-speaking world”

Ariana Harwicz was born in Argentina and Lives in France. She studied screenwriting and drama in Argentina, and earned a first degree in Performing Arts from the University of Paris VII as well as a Master’s degree in comparative literature from the Sorbonne.

“Die My Love” was published in 2012 as “Matate, amor” and has been jointly and wonderfully translated by Sarah Moses and Caroline Orloff (joint founder of Charco Press).

On a recent interview on Jackie Law's excellent neverimitate blog the author explained in answer to a question about her background:

https://neverimitate.wordpress.com/au...

I always say that I was born when I wrote Die, My Love. Before then, I was alive, in the same way that everybody is alive, yet for me that is not really being alive. I had recently had a baby, I had moved to live in the countryside next to a forest. I would watch the thunderstorms, I would go horse-riding, but that was not life for me. And then I wrote Die, My Love, immersed in that desperation between death and desire. Die, My Love comes from that. I wasn’t aware I was writing a novel. I was not a writer, rather, I was saving myself, slowly lifting my head out of the swamp with each line.I always say that I was born when I wrote Die, My Love. Before then, I was alive, in the same way that everybody is alive, yet for me that is not really being alive. I had recently had a baby, I had moved to live in the countryside next to a forest. I would watch the thunderstorms, I would go horse-riding, but that was not life for me. And then I wrote Die, My Love, immersed in that desperation between death and desire. Die, My Love comes from that. I wasn’t aware I was writing a novel. I was not a writer, rather, I was saving myself, slowly lifting my head out of the swamp with each line.

The book itself is therefore strongly autobiographical. The opening paragraph immediately sets the scene and the tone for the rest of the book, narrated by the mother of a small child.

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. …. 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

The narrator we quickly realise seems to be suffering from Post Partum Depression,

I’ve been needing the loo since lunch but it’s impossible to do anything other than be a mother. Enough already with the crying. He cries and cries and cries. I’m going to lose my mind. I’m a mother, full stop. And I regret it, but I can’t even say that .... Mummy was happy before the baby came. Now Mummy gets up each day wanting to run away from the baby while he just cries harder and harder. I need the loo, but his interminable clucking and grousing makes it impossible.

Or perhaps more strictly peripartum depression, since it's clear her symptoms were already severe and causing concern among her in-laws at the Christmas just before the birth.

The advice I was given by that young social worker who came to our house when my mother-in-law called, alarmed: ‘If your child cries so much that you feel like you can’t go on and you’re about to lose control, get out of there. Leave the child with someone else and find a place where you can regain composure and calm. If you’re alone and there’s no one to leave him with, go somewhere else anyway. Leave the child in a safe place and take a few steps back.’ ........ But I’m thinking about pacing up and down with the baby in my arms, hour after hour of tedious choreography, from the exhaustion to screaming, screaming to exhaustion. And I think about how a child is a wild animal, about another person carrying your heart forever

The narrator is a foreigner, from a City background, well educated and with a taste for classical music, all of which causes her to be openly scornful of her country dwelling, closely knit in-laws and their decent lives and conventional tastes, which she sees as beyond mundane.

If I could lynch my whole family to be alone for one minute with Glenn Gould, I’d do it.

Later on I saw [my father in law] 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 ate dinner, all of us together again, and I can still remember the tired, backlit image of an average man who thinks he’s exceptional. After that, he cleaned his dentures and went to bed. And this is a day lived? This is a human being living a day of his life?

On rainy days in the city, people consume films, plays, restaurant meals. Out in the country they tell each other stories, thinking they can fight off the boredom that way

Here we are, one more family going out to watch the sunset. As though we had no idea that the sun came up and went down again. I mean, seriously, it does this every day

Even their concern for her, only increases her rage at their predictability – she resents the well-meaning advice of her mother in law, and says of her husband: My better half had been listening in from behind the door – yes, the playwright of my life is that mediocre.

What also came across to me was how the very act of motherhood, has fallen shorts of her hopes and expectations for it. Of her son she remarks

I hope the first word my son says is a beautiful one ... And if it isn’t, I’d rather he didn’t speak at all. I want him to say magnolia, to say compassion, not Mum or Dad, not water. I want him to say dalliance.

Me, a woman who didn’t want to register her son. Who wanted a son with no record, no identity. A stateless son, with no date of birth or last name or social status. A wandering son. A son born not in a delivery room but in the darkest corner of the woods. A son who’s not silenced with dummies but rocked to sleep by animal cries

In practice though the opposite occurs and the claustrophobia she feels from the interference of her neighbours and from the assumption of her in-laws that she will adapt to become part of their family, is only magnified as the existence of the child, in their eyes, legitimises the active intervention of nurses, social workers and locals and the advice of her family. This only drives her to further extremes of behaviour:

When my husband goes away in the middle of summer I leave a plastic doll on the back seat of the car and wait for the alarmed neighbours and state employees to come running. I love watching them react like the good citizens they are, like heroes who want to smash the window and save the little one from suffocating. It’s fun to see the fire engine arrive in the village, its siren sounding. Morons, all of them.

One senses also that the reality of the countryside has also fallen short of her own fantasies of it – or perhaps more accurately that the banality of life there does not match her own more dramatic, and artistically and sexually charged views of the growth, reproduction and decay at the heart of nature.

And then I saw the air saturated with invisible sexual tension. Rembrandt. The acorns fell and fell and fell so lazily, so heavily between the treetops and the earth that they seemed to be asleep in the air. To be cutting the air with golden rays. Caravaggio. That spell, that somnolence that comes over you as you watch leaves twirl once, twice, a third time before reaching the ground. One leaf falls, then another and another. An atmosphere that leaves you open-mouthed, that turns your saliva into fresh water. Farewell to mould and darkness. The death of summer turned the woods into silence and sighs

And, once a writer and it seems literature student, she is bought up with a jolt listening to a radio critic discussing literature in words she has not heard for years, and contrasting it with the banality of her own life.

I wonder what I’d make of this very woodland, this rustic setting, the half-built house, the man nailing down planks of wood, if a critic said my writing dealt with ‘the interconnectivity of human existence

The narrator is frustrated at her partner's apparent low libido; however it's clear a large part of that is caused by his fears over her mental state and that the narrator herself is perhaps more interested in being sexually provocative and explicit in her speech than in sex itself.

I like thinking about sex, not having it. I was always good at the theory and a failure at the practical bit, that’s why I don’t know how to drive even though I’ve learnt the traffic laws by heart.

The second part of this quote again gets to some of the heart of the breech between the narrator and her in-laws; her husband convinced that if she simply put some practical effort into learning to drive and so gained some increased freedom and mobility that in itself would go a long way to improving her mood, she railing at his inability to understand her much deeper frustrations and furies.

In the neverimitate interview, Ariana Harwicz calls the book not just a novel, but also a mournful poem, a song, a sonata by Schubert or Rachmaninov mixed with ‘Stronger than me’ by Amy Winehouse - Winehouse's debut single and one described at the time in a Guardian review as a "bold assault on New Man and his values".

Her views on sex however, do not prevent her from fantasising about a married neighbour (to the extent she starts imagining him fantasising about her), and then it seems (albeit with the instability and unreliability of our narrator distinguishing fact from fantasy can be as hard for us as it seems to be for her) having a brief affair with him, which later disintegrates into stalking on her side and into the climax of the book.

Finally one element of this book is that none of the family characters are named (although three of the neighbours and a bit at a party are). This is not done in a way to draw attention (as occurs in books where only one character is not named, or where characters are labelled as Mr. A etc.) but is a clear part of the book – with characters simply described as my son, my husband, my father-in-law etc.

The implication of this to me, is that identity (particularly within the family which the narrator has joined) is defined by status and role – something that others seem contended to embrace but which the narrator pushed back against, rejecting the traditional concepts of mother or wife.

I was recently able to discuss this aspect with the co-translator of the book (also co-owner of Charco Press). Incidentally it is a great advantage of small presses that you can directly engage with them. Her views:

None of the main characters in Ariana’s three novels have names. And this is due to several reasons, I think. On one hand, they tend to be antisocial, a-social rather, they are pariahs. They are not protected by legality. They are on the margins, and not just in terms of their class –although that too- but mostly in philosophical terms. Secondly, their namelessness has to do with the theatrical dimension of her prose. They are mere characters, pawns of the story, theatre elements. They are characters that respond to roles, not to names, because they are not people, they have not been born per se. Thus, they respond to mother, husband, father-in-law, lover, and not to names. Through this, Ariana shows the artificiality of the roles imposed by society (like Becket does with these characters ‘A’, ‘B’, ‘C’), the artificiality that lies inherently in every love relationship, in every family relationship, and so forth. Finally, it is also an aesthetic choice. This is part of her aesthetics, of her style, something that defines her prose.

I found the book a compelling portrait of peripartum depression, the first clinical diagnosis of which I found seemed a great summary of the narrators situation Peripartum depression should be distinguished from the baby blues, which is characterized by short duration, mild symptoms, and minimal impact on functioning. Women with peripartum depression should be evaluated for bipolar disorder, postpartum psychosis, and suicidal risk.

It also summarises our concern as readers, that a book which starts with such violent imagery can only end in harm for the narrator, her husband, her baby or perhaps all of them and so the menace which lays at the heart of this book as the narrator’s mental state disintegrates and her family “gradually succumbs to the radiation of infidelity.

Overall a vivid, powerful and disturbing read.

My thanks to Charco Press for a review copy.

[Enrique · Rating 4 out of 5]

Desde bien temprano en esta novela percibes que le sobra calidad. Aquí el estilo es bueno, aunque le pide un extra al lector: frases cortas, sin puntos aparte, una masa de texto que debes leer despacito, sin prisa para no irte del tema, de los continuos brincos que da la autora.

"Mi marido quiere plantar un árbol para darle larga vida al bebé y yo no sé qué decirle, sonrío cómo una gansa. ¿Se da cuenta él? De todas las bellas y sanas mujeres que hay en la región, se vino a enganchar conmigo. Un caso clínico. Alguien que deberse clasificada incurable. Qué día de humedad, ¿eh?, parece que tenemos para rato, dice él. Yo trago la botella en sorbos largos y aspiro por la nariz queriendo estar, exactamente, muerta".
 
El contenido (no hago espóiler, lo importante es el cómo lo cuenta): clima inquietante, va trufando obviedades, con actitudes tiernas, con saltos temporales, con disparates, o con intenciones homicidas, o humor negro.
 
Hasta el título es bueno, con ese voseo tan característico, no es MÁtate amor (con acento) en la A, sino MatÁte (lo pongo yo la tilde extra incorrectamente).
 
Toda una sensación Ariana Harwicz.
 
Es muy original el estilo y el planteamiento de una protagonista-¿autora? enfadada. No te descubre las cartas de inicio. Una narración un poco oscura y encriptada.
 
De fondo una madre joven, saturada por la reciente maternidad y las mentiras que envuelven esa novedad, cansada del esposo, de la vida conyugal… pero no lo cuenta como otras autoras contemporáneas suyas, digamos que más al uso: lo hace desde una cierta brutalidad e intenciones oscuras, homicidas, cargadas de sexualidad. No se conoce el origen de esa perturbación, si es algo mental post-parto, o es algo innato que está en su naturaleza.
 
La protagonista no tiene nombre, al igual que ninguno de los que la rodean. A pesar de los problemas mentales, se apuntan diagnósticos súper lúcidos.
 
Hay que estar muy atentos para determinar 1) Quién narra en cada capítulo, 2) Captar el mensaje, hay que leer despacito, 3) Saborear la poesía en prosa que a veces cuela, 4) Quedarse con el mensaje que lanza en esta prosa densa de frases cortas y afiladas.
 
Es distinto por todos los ángulos que se mire. No es una lectura para mayorías, queda dejado el aviso.

[Jenny (Reading Envy) · Rating 4 out of 5]

I couldn't stop thinking about this book. It is so dark, some of it is unsettling because I couldn't tell what was fantasy and what was really happening, but even more unsettling because it puts you inside the headspace of a woman who was already isolated in a country that is not her own, and then she has children. She is trapped, she could kill her son, she could kill herself, she could hurt herself, it never goes away. It is a suffocating narrative and it took me a while to decide what to think. Surely it takes an author's writing ability to put me there. But also - I did not want to be there. So it was quite the reading quandry. It's lucky the book is so short, it would have been harder to be in that space much longer. But it is also good to show the exacting inner turmoil of motherhood and all of the weight of the expectations that comes with it. How your identity shifts, how you are forever seen as a mother, sometimes first, sometimes only. She conveys it well.

Not only the cover blurb makes me think so, but there is something similar here to the tone and bewilderment of reading experience with Fever Dream, from another female author in the same country.

This was on the longlist for the Man Booker International Prize 2018 but not the shortlist.

[Hugh · Rating 5 out of 5]

My third book from the excellent Republic of Consciousness prize shortlist.
This book has also been longlisted for the Man Booker International Prize

This is a raw, visceral and intensely personal novella, the dark interior monologue of a young woman on the verge of madness who wants to break free of the expectations created by being a mother of a small child, struggling to contain destructive urges. This is not always easy to follow and is often a little uncomfortable to read, but it is very impressive and quite beautiful in places.

[Pedro · Rating 4 out of 5]

La narradora de esta novela está furiosa, desesperada, ávida. ¿Esto es mi vida? Cambiar pañales a un niño que no cesa de llorar, atender al marido al que considera un niño más. Viviendo en su casa campestre, en medio de la naturaleza, como bello decorado, agobiante todo por la perfección planificada. Sólo la aparición del ciervo, espléndido con su gran cornamenta, es capaz de ganar su respeto. Lo demás es huida, postergación. ¿Sufre alguna enfermedad mental? ¿Es que acaso alguien podría definir cuál es límite entre el sufrimiento violento y la enfermedad mental? Esta es la pregunta que recorre la novela, mientras sus conductas se vuelven cada más impredecibles y rabiosas. Personalmente, he querido leer esta novela desde la mirada de la narradora, y he encontrado insatisfacción, la furia de un tigre enjaulado.
La novela es interesante y ágil; he encontrado alguna dificultad para situarme en los muchos saltos que da la narración, debiendo volver a veces a releer el párrafo; y aún así, hubo partes que no he entendido: ¿Recuerda? ¿Sueña? ¿Vive? ¿O es toda una continuidad sin límites que su mente no es capaz de distinguir?
Un libro difícil de clasificar (y de calificar; le pondré 4/5 porque está muy bien elaborado); me ha atrapado, confundido y hecho sufrir más que disfrutar. Veremos que se decanta con el correr de los días.

[Ana Olga · Rating 4 out of 5]

Vaya que se necesita mucho valor para atreverse a escribir sobre una realidad muy muy tabú y condenada: La depresión post parto y al punto extremo al que puede llegar.
De verdad que ... ¡ que manera de escribir!
Tremendo ingenio y narrativa
¡Olé sus ovarios!

Es intensa y escalofriante.
Claro que pienso leer más obras de ésta escritora👏🏼👌🏼

[NenaMounstro · Rating 5 out of 5]

Qué tirón. Empezaré por explicar que es la primera vez que me siento dentro de la mente de un personaje, ese sentimiento de saber todo lo que piensa es bastante perturbador. En realidad, en todo el libro nunca estás en otro lado más que dentro de todo lo que ve y quiere hacer. Pero esta vez estás dentro de la mente de una mujer perturbada, de una mujer que está al borde de todo. Ese límite es el que te tiene con un nudo en el estómago durante las poquísimas pero intensísimas páginas experimentas todo tipo de tensiones. Por ejemplo, en esta oración: “No iba a matarlo, solté el cuchillo y salí a lavar la ropa como si nada hubiera pasado”.

La maternidad, la depresión post-parto, los momentos psicóticos, el sexo, la familia, la migración, la infidelidad y la locura son parte de este monólogo verborréico interno e histérico –hay muy pocos diálogos- donde tú como espectador estás al borde todo el tiempo esperando que el peligro y la amenaza llegue a cumplirse.

El lengujae puede ser un poco cansado al principio ya que las metáforas que usa a veces resultan bastante rebuscadas y no estoy acostumbrada , pero una vez que entiendes qué personaje juegas tú como lector dentro de la novela simplemente las dejas pasar y solo eres testigo de la ruptura mental y quiebre emocional de ella.

Una historia que se sale de las normas, de lo correcto, de lo valiente y estóica que debe de ser una madre que acaba de dar a luz, acá lo único que vez es las grietas mentales que cada vez se van haciendo más grandes. Una incorrección política del deber ser es lo que la autora escribe, desde el lugar incómodo de ese lugar de donde nadie se atreve a hablar pero sí sentir y pensar. Como decía Rimbaud “Hay que correrse de la moralidad para escribir”

En estos momentos como lectora, como lo he venido repitiendo, busco la singularidad de las historias, esos libros casi únicos en su manera de ser contados, los libros maliciosos, los que me provoquen, los que me saquen de mi zona de confort y me hagan leer .

Y por último leí una entrevista de la autora donde dice: “La maternidad me parece algo como de ciencia ficción, es una de las vivencias más enloquecedoras que una mujer pueda tener. Esa locura que se forme un cuerpo dentro del tuyo y que luego lo expulses y que después tengas que amarlo para siempre es una identidad un poco falsa. Hay mujeres que aún teniendo un hijo no se sienten madres y ahí es donde se genera el caos. Por ejemplo, aquí en México las mamás tienen un lugar santificado y eso es muy agobiante para las mujeres”

No, no es una lectura fácil, no, tampoco es una lectura para todos, es una novela maliciosa, perturbadora, no fácil de leer, pero fascinante y deslumbrante. Lo chingón de estos libros es que sabes que solo algunos lo leerán y se dará pie a formar una sociedad secreta de gente que lee libros peligrosos.

[Santiago González · Rating 1 out of 5]

Madamme Bovary hardcore

Sé que es la novela de moda, que estuvo preseleccionada para el prestigiosísimo "Man Bookers International", que toca un tema de moda - algo que todos los que somos padres/madres sabemos pero tal vez no nos atrevíamos a expresar - y es que criar o tener un niño puede no ser lo idílico que imaginábamos. Sé todo esto pero lo siento, me aburrí.

Me pasó algo loco, empecé a leer la novela en un viaje de ida en avión y recién lo pude retomar tres días después, a la vuelta. En el medio perdí la marca y empecé a buscar dónde la había dejado, como no encontré el punto y me di cuenta de que no recordaba nada, lo empecé de nuevo. Le di 120 páginas de un tirón y las 30 restantes las leí ya en casa.

Me pasó que no le creí. Está escrito en primera persona y el narrador habla todo el tiempo en un registro poético, como esas frases que siempre se nos ocurren cuando pasó el diálogo crucial que tuvimos ese día con un jefe, padre o amante. Encima es una primera persona en viaje hacia un lugar que no voy a revelar, lo que agrava esa percepción.

Tal vez sea un problema de expectativas, las tenía demasiado altas cuando encaré la lectura.

Es una especie de "Madamme Bovary hardcore"; no tanto por lo sexual sino por lo explícito; y le reconozco que la escena que desata el final está muy buena.

Pero leánla y saquen su propia conclusión. Por ahí simplemente no era un libro para mí. Obviamente Ariana Harwicz escribe bárbaro; a mí, como triste reseñador en Goodreads que no logra ensamblar un cuento ni en Tierra del Fuego, sólo me queda el consuelo de poner estrellitas.

[Paul Fulcher · Rating 4 out of 5]

Now deservedly part of the outstanding shortlist for the 2017 Republic of Consciousness Prize for 'gorgeous prose and hardcore literary fiction' from small, independent presses - and recognised by the Man Booker International longlist (book 4/13) for me

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.

Los hombres acá preparan el invierno como las bestias. Nada nos distingue a unos de otros. Yo misma, letrada y graduada universitaria, soy más bestia que esos zorros desahuciados con la cara teñida de rojo y un palo atravesándoles la boca de par en par.

My 2017 reading year has focused on the UK's small independent press scene, source of the most exciting literary fiction. Many were already familiar to me (Fitzcarraldo, Tramp Press, Peirene, Galley Beggar, And Other Stories) but Charco Press is new, not just to me, but to the publishing scene generally. Their name is taken from the colloquial expression 'cruzar el charco' meaning 'crossing the puddle', a way of referring to when someone is going overseas, or travelling between continents, and their mission is to bring exciting Latin American literature, via translation, to the UK. Their mission statement is worth quoting in full:

Charco Press was born from a desire to do something a little out of the ordinary. To bring you, the reader, books from a different part of the world. Outstanding books. Books you want to read. Maybe even books you need to read.

Charco Press is ambitious. We aim to change the current literary scene and make room for a kind of literature that has been overlooked. We want to be that bridge between a world of talented contemporary writers and yourself.

We select authors whose works feed the imagination, challenge perspective and spark debate. Authors that are shining lights in the world of contemporary literature. Authors whose works have won awards and received critical acclaim. Bestselling authors. Yet authors you perhaps have never heard of. Because none of them have been published in English.

Until now.

Die, My Love by Ariana Harwicz was one of their two launch books this Summer and tells the story of an unnamed new mother and her - strikingly also unnamed in her narration - husband and first born child, six months old as the novel opens. It is a visceral and haunting story of post-partum depression which begins, strikingly:

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?

This is not a mother who is sentimental for her child or the mystery of birth:

If I'd closed my legs and 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. I'm coming, baby! I want to scream, but I sink deeper into the cracked earth.

University educated and from urban surrounds, the French countryside where she lives also depresses her:

These people are going to make me lose it. I wish I had Egon Schiele, Lucian Freud and Francis Bacon for neighbours; then my son could grow up and develop intellectually by learning that there’s more to the world I brought him into than opening old skylights you can’t see out of anyway. As soon as all the others 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.

Harwicz wrote the book listening 'obsessively' to Beethoven's Piano Sonata n. 13 in E flat major, Op. 27 n. 1 and Glenn Gould's rendition of part of the Sonata captures the book's mood https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sN7Wl....

As the novel progresses, in a stream of fevered thoughts, it is not always clear what actually takes place and what - notably an affair with another parent in the locality - is imagined:

My baby was practically asleep on his feet but he still went on stumbling through the house, holding onto the curtains and the century-old coffee tables and throwing whatever he found to the floor. Ashtrays, cutlery. Maybe he was staying awake to make sure I didn’t spend the night in another man’s arms. It was a long time before I was finally able to put him in the cot, stop his crying, turn the pages of one of his books about astronauts or sea captains and convince him that the best thing you can do at night is sleep. Mummy’s telling lies.
<...>
As soon I stepped outside, I saw him and forgot about everything that had come before, about the smouldering house, about my little soldier sleeping with his eyes open like a rabbit, about all those days of anguished anticipation. And I devoured him. Because that, my dear son, is what the night is for.

But her relationship with her, even in her account, remarkably patient, husband is characterised by an extreme form of love-hate:

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.
(and some years later at her son's birthday party)
Something made me rush inside and shut myself in my bedroom, slamming the door behind me. I hope you all die, every last one of you. As usual, he came knocking on my door. Darling, honey, sugar, sweetheart, my bunny rabbit, my love, I can’t remember all the names he called me. And I said nothing. Are you okay? And I still said nothing. Come out, all the guests are leaving, don’t ruin this. Where are the party bags? And I said, Why don’t you leave me the hell alone and die. Just die, my love.

The contemporary translation by Sarah Moses (Asymptote’s Editor-at-Large for Argentina) and Carolina Orioff (Editor and Co-Director of Charco Press) adds to the power of the work.

It has, as other reviewers have noted, a flavour of Fever Dream meets Sorry to Disrupt the Peace, and while it doesn't quite hit the heights of either, neither does anything else I have read (given they are my two favourite books of 2017). Overall a striking novel and I was immediately prompted to subscribe to Charco Press's forthcoming releases.

[Júlia Peró · Rating 5 out of 5]

Alejada de toda complacencia, así es como yo también quiero escribir.

[Guzzo · Rating 4 out of 5]

Una mujer vomita lo que siente, vomita la vida que no quiere vivir, vomita el hijo que tiene delante y que podría no estar, y vomita un marido como cualquier otro. Una vida por la que no tiene aprecio, que le asquea; un hijo al que no quiere y que reclama su atención todo el tiempo, que la agobia y la asfixia.

Y mientras lo vas leyendo, te va salpicando todo el rato.

[Eylül Görmüş · Rating 4 out of 5]

"Öğle yemeğinden beri tuvalete gitmek istiyorum ama anne olmaktan başka bir şey yapmak imkansız. Ağlayıp duruyor üstelik, ağlıyor, ağlıyor ve ağlıyor, aklımı oynatacağım. Anneyim ben, nokta. Pişmanım esasında ama bunu söyleyemem bile."

Hayatımda okuduğum en sert metinlerden biriydi Ariana Harwicz'in "Geber Aşkım"ı. 2018'de Booker Ödülü'nün uzun listesine seçilen kitap hakikaten çok ama çok ürkütücü - her cümlesine şiddet sinmiş o ağulu metinlerden biri bu. Ariana Harwicz Arjantinli bir genç yazar, Çağdaş Arjantin edebiyatıyla ilişkimi daha da derinleştirme hevesim çerçevesinde tanıştım kendisiyle. Çerçeve bu olunca tabii aklıma hemen Samanta Schweblin geliyor ve izninizle kıyaslıyorum; sanırım şöyle diyebilirim: sürekli "tekinsiz" diyip durduğum Schweblin metinleri, bunun yanında çocuklara uyku öncesi masalları gibi kalıyor.

Arka kapak Clarice Lispector ve Sylvia Plath'ın edebi izlerini takip ettiğini söylüyor yazarın, doğru. Metinde sık sık geçen Virginia Woolf göndermelerini de bence eklemeli, anlatıcının durmaksızın deliliğin sınırlarında gezme (ve hatta zaman zaman o sınırı aşma), içine düştüğü derin depresyonda debelenme halini Woolf ile özdeşleştirmesi anlaşılır. Ben biraz da Elfriede Jelinek ve Ingeborg Bachmann havası sezdim ki yani bu saydığım isimlere aşinaysanız zaten nasıl vahşi bir metin olduğu kafanızda canlanmıştır.

Ben anne değilim, anne olma arzusu hiç duymadım, bu fikri kafamda pek çevirmedim de bugüne dek. Dolayısıyla daha mesafeli bir yerden yorumlayabiliyorum - ama anne olan (ve özellikle doğum sonrası depresyonu yaşamış) genç kadınlar acaba bu çırılçıplak metni okurken ne hissederler merak etmiyor değilim. Anneliğin içine hapsolmuş bir kadını dinliyoruz kitap boyunca, o hapisten çıkmaya çalışıyor, ruhsal ve fiziksel arzularını neredeyse vahşi hayvanlar gibi şiddetle dışavuruyor, dişliyor, yırtıyor, parçalıyor çıkışı bulmak için.

Ailenin kutsallığını, ışıltılı annelik ideasını, sadakate dair mitleri çok rahatsız edici biçimde yerle bir eden bir metin. Sevdim ya da sevmedim diyemeyeceğim kadar kafamı karıştırdı. Ama çok çok kuvvetli olduğunu söyleyebilirim.

[Sidharth Vardhan · Rating 5 out of 5]

longlisted for international booker 2018

"I'm fed up with the fact that it’s not okay to bad-mouth your own baby or walk around firing a gun."

I know, right? As somebody of other said human beings are born free, but everywhere they are in chain. Chains of different types - social, religious, national etc. In this case, they are of family. The chains of expectations as to how mother should talk, behave, feel. I mean we all know that everyone can not be a cook, but we do always expect everyone to be a good parent. Specially mothers.

If you think about it, all freedoms boil down to just one freedom - the freedom to be oneself. And being a parent (again, specially mothers in a traditional patriarchal families) must take a heavy toll on one's freedom - for you are no longer doing what you want to do, but are struck looking after those stupid, smelling, needy little creatures that won't even thank you for the trouble (okay, why are people bothered with those children, again?) The protagonist of this somewhat autobiographical novel is a woman passionate about literature - in fact, so passionate, that literature is only thing that is beautiful to her - literature and sex (okay that is true for me too ); and she doesn't get much of either struck in her present roles of mother, wife and daughter-in-law.

But one's family stands by one in times of need. But what if they are not good at it?

"I can’t remember having done anything in particular to reveal how desperate I was feeling. For some time I’d been containing everything, or so I thought, in a swaying motion that was subtle though intensifying, when, suddenly, I was offered a seat and something cool to drink. Since when did sitting down and having some water get rid of the desire to die? Thanks, Grandma. I’m fine though. But they sat me down and brought me the glass of cool water anyway. These people are going to make me lose it. I wish I had Egon Schiele, Lucian Freud and Francis Bacon for neighbours; then my son could grow up and develop intellectually by learning that there’s more to the world I brought him into than opening old skylights you can’t see out of anyway."

I know that when he slides open the door I’ll turn into a black swan, and when he starts shouting I’ll be a castrated duck. Okay, I’m going in. I’ll stop trying to draw blood from a stone. I’ll contain my madness, I’ll use the bathroom. I’ll put my baby to sleep, jerk off my man and postpone my rebellion in favour of a better life. Me, a woman who didn’t want to register her son. Who wanted a son with no record, no identity. A stateless son, with no date of birth or last name or social status. A wandering son. A son born not in a delivery room but in the darkest corner of the woods. A son who’s not silenced with dummies but rocked to sleep by animal cries. What saves me tonight, and every other night, has nothing to do with my husband’s love or my son’s. What saves me is the stag’s golden eye, still staring at me.

I love it when prose mirrors the feelings of narrator with such intensity - and in my reading, the women authors seem to do it more frequently (Woolf, Plath, Lispector and now this one).

[Viv JM · Rating 5 out of 5]

"Die, My Love" is a short book about a new mother battling with post natal depression/psychosis, written in the first person. The narrator is never named, and she does not name her husband or baby son either, which adds to the sense of unreality and detachment. It is difficult to tell which events are real and which are the product of her deeply disturbed mind. It is a very dark and unsettling book, but also very poetic and beautifully written/translated.

This is the first book I have read published by Charco Press, and I am impressed with the quality of the translation but also the beautiful design of the book itself.

[Alejandra Arévalo · Rating 4 out of 5]

Mátate, amor es un relato sobre el horror de la familia, el matrimonio, la maternidad y quizás el campo. Pareciera que de ellos no podemos decir los horrores porque no existen, pero en esta novela Ariana Harwicz nos demuestra que no sólo hay horrores que desesperan y que nacen en las estructuras más sobrevaloradas por nuestra sociedad, sino también aburrimientos que llevan a la infidelidad, al desconocimiento del hijo y sobre todo a la locura. Usando como pretexto el campo (que nos remonta a lo lejano, vacío, ajeno a los otros, abandonado y primitivo) la autora pone a su protagonista como narradora errática, por momentos no sabes si es el presente o el pasado el que narra, pero quizás es a propósito pues no parece que la protagonista quiera contar su historia a la perfección, no es significativo el orden de su historia, sino cómo la cuenta y cómo la transmite. Definitivamente no es una lectura que te deja tranquila, ni siquiera creo que te deja con el completo entendimiento de lo que sucedió, pero sí sabes que algo ahí terrible ha pasado y que de todas maneras todo seguirá igual.

[Maria Bikaki · Rating 4 out of 5]

Σε προηγούμενη κριτική μου για τα «άδεια σπίτια» είχα εξηγήσει τους λόγους για τους οποίους δεν έγινα μητέρα καθώς και για την σχεδόν εμμονική μου πίστη και αφοσίωση για χρόνια ν’ αποκτήσω. Μερικά χρόνια πριν δεν ξέρω κατά πόσο θα μου ήταν τόσο εύκολο να διαβάσω το «σκοτώσου αγάπη». Δεν ήμουν έτοιμη να βγω από την τσιχλόφουσκα μου και ήθελα να βλέπω τη μητρότητα από την ιερή και «χρωματιστή της πλευρά. Σήμερα, έχοντας πλέον αλλάξει ρούτα στη ζωή μου και έχοντας πολύ διαφορετικές πεποιθήσεις και ανάγκες θεωρώ ότι βιβλίο σαν και τούτο το ωμό αλλά μικρό διαμαντάκι είναι κάτι παραπάνω από απλή λογοτεχνία. Είναι μια κραυγή βοήθειας από την Αριάνα Χάρουιτς, μια φωνή διαμαρτυρίας μιας μάνας, μιας μάνας παγιδευμένης σε μια σκοτεινή συνθήκη που αφηγείται ουσιαστικά την άλλη πλευρά. Τη βάναυση πλευρά της μητρότητας που καλεί τη γυναίκα ν’ αναπτύξει συγκεκριμένα συναισθήματα χαράς και ευτυχίας, καταπνίγοντας συναισθήματα που δεν είναι κοινωνικά αποδεκτά. Σύμφωνα με την κοινωνία σε καμία γυναίκα δεν επιτρέπεται να εκφράσει τους φόβους της, ποια να τολμήσει άλλωστε να παραδεχτεί ότι α ξέρεις τι μετάνιωσα που έκανα το μωρό μου και όχι μόνο αυτό αλλά πολλές φορές σκέφτομαι να του κάνω και κακό. Σε μια πραγματικά «ασφυκτική» αφήγηση η συγγραφέας δίνει μια διαφορετική διάσταση στο βάρος των προσδοκιών που σου ξυπνάει η μητρότητα. Αλυσίδες προσδοκιών για το πώς πρέπει να νιώθει μια μάνα γιατί οι γονείς για το κοινωνικό σύνολο πρέπει να είναι πάντα οι καλοί. Μπορεί να μην είσαι καλός φίλος, καλός στη δουλειά σου αλλά για το κοινωνικό σύνολο οφείλεις να είσαι ένας καθόλα άμεμπτος και καλός γονιός, τίμημα βαρύ απέναντι στις προσωπικές ελευθερίες του καθενός ειδικά της μητέρας.
Μια εσωτερική ματιά στην επιλόχειο κατάθλιψη που μπορεί να σε συνθλίψει με την ηρωίδα να προσπαθεί να βρει τη δική της διέξοδο στη συγγρ��φή και τη λογοτεχνία προκειμένου ν αποφύγει την πλήρη ψυχική κατάρρευση που έχει προκληθεί από την οδυνηρή διαπίστωση της απομόνωσης μιας γυναίκας που δεν παλεύει να είναι καλή και δυνατή αλλά αντίθετα παλεύει να μην είναι κακή.

«Ήθελα να πάω στο μπάνιο από το μεσημέρι αλλά δε μπορώ να κάνω τίποτ’ άλλο από το το να είμαι μητέρα. Και φτάνει πια με το κλάμα, κλαίει, κλαίει, κλαίει, θα μου στρίψει. Είμαι μητέρα τελεία. Και λυπάμαι που ούτε να το πω δε μπορώ. Στο αγόρι που κάθεται στα γόνατα μου, παίζοντας με ένα κόκκαλο κοτόπουλου; Άστο κάτω αυτό, θα πνιγείς. Του δίνω ένα μπισκοτάκι. Δεν περιμένω να φάει το μπισκότο, του βάζω άλλο ένα στο στόμα και πνίγεται. Δεν έχω καμιά ευθύνη για το τι μπορεί να σκέφτεται για μένα. Τον έφερα στον κόσμο, κι αυτό αρκεί. Είμαι μητέρα αυτόματου πιλότου. Κλαψουρίζει και αυτό είναι χειρότερο απ’ το κλάμα. Τον σηκώνω, του χαρίζω ένα ψεύτικο χαμόγελο, σφίγγω τα δόντια. Η μαμά ήταν ευτυχισμένη πριν έρθει το μωρό. Η μαμά ξυπνάει κάθε μέρα θέλοντας να φύγει μακριά απ’ το μωρό και αυτό κλαίει ακόμα πιο πολύ. Θέλω να πάω στο μπάνιο, αλλά αυτή η ατελείωτη γκρίνια δε με αφήνει. Τι θέλει από μένα; Τι θέλεις; Δε με αφήνει να το αφήσω. Τεντώνεται προς τα πίσω. Χτες αναγκάστηκα να πάω να τα κάνω μαζί του, σήμερα προτιμώ να τα κάνω πάνω μου…. Δε μπορώ πια να κρατηθώ. Μέσα μου έχω μια μεγάλη φούσκα. Αφήνω το μωρό να πέσει, σταυρώνω τα πόδια.Τρέχω στο μπάνιο και κλείνομαι. Εκείνο κλαίει σπαραχτικά, σαν ασιάτισσα μοιρολογήτρα σε κηδεία. Δεν αντέχω να το ακούω, και του ανοίγω. Σκέφτομαι πόσο αποκαρδιωτικά είναι όλα αυτά».

Εκτός από τη μητρότητα, το σεξ, η οικογένεια και ο θεσμός αυτής αποτελούν μέρη αυτού του εσωτερικού μονολόγου στην οποία ο αναγνώστης είναι θεατής και που κατά διαστήματα θα δημιουργήσουν ένα σφιχτό κόμπο στο στομάχι του καθώς γινόμαστε μάρτυρες της ψυχικής και συναισθηματικής της κατάρρευσης.
Πολλοι θα το βρουν ενοχλητικό. Αυτή ακριβώς η δυσφορία που μπορεί να σου δημιουργήσει όμως είναι ακριβώς αυτό που κάνει το βιβλίο τόσο εκθαμβωτικά και οδυνηρά ενδιαφέρον. Άβολο μα και συνάμα άγρια γοητευτικό. Και ξέρετε και τι νομίζω αυτό είναι και η μαγεία της λογοτεχνίας. Ότι σε πηγαίνει μέρη και καταστάσεις που στην πραγματικότητα δε θες να πας ή μάλλον να ζήσεις όμως καλώς ή κακώς υπάρχουν και ταλανίζουν πολύ κόσμο εκεί έξω. Ψυχικά νοσούντες που δεν το διάλεξαν σε παγιδευμένα σώματα και κατ’ επέκταση σε παγιδευμένες ζωές. 4*

[Jimena · Rating 4 out of 5]

Crudo, salvaje, voraz. El monólogo interior de una mujer desbordada por la maternidad, la depresión post parto y la alienación de una vida rural que le resulta plana y opresiva.

Con menos de doscientas páginas, capítulos cortos y un lenguaje que oscila entre una descarnada crudeza y metáforas elaboradas, Harwicz nos sumerge sin piedad en la psiquis desbordada de una madre, una esposa, una mujer. Es un testimonio vivo, hambriento y valientemente harto de la vida conyugal y el rol de protectora. Es, además, un grito desgarrado de erotismo que roza lo grotesco.

No es una lectura liviana ni mucho menos esperanzadora pero es, en cierta medida, catártica. Recomiendo asfixiarse con y en ella.

[Claire]

Usually I read books because I am drawn to them by the premise, by the cultural setting, by an author's intriguing background and experience which suggests to me they may have interesting insights to explore within a novel.

I hesitated about whether to read Die, My Love because of what I perceived as its intensity, I thought it might be depressing. The reviewer whom I expressed this too, responded:

I would say razor sharp and brutally honest rather than depressing. No punches are pulled.

She was reviewing it, along with all the other titles long listed for the new The Republic of Consciousness Prize literary prize created by novelist Neil Griffiths to acknowledge and celebrate "small presses producing brilliant and brave literary fiction” published in the UK and Ireland.

When it was short listed, I decided to read it and find out, despite the earlier hesitation.

We meet a young woman, a university educated foreigner, living in the French countryside with her husband and their small child, another on the way. She is lying in the grass, in 35°C (95°F) summer heat, thinking disturbing, violent thoughts against those around her, while expressing an acute, brutal self-hatred alongside an intense uncontrollable desire.

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.

It's written in an urgent stream of consciousness narrative, focused on the minutiae of her day, much of it spent waiting for her husband to return from work, observing herself by turn, in her acts of taking care of and neglecting the needs of her helpless son, fantasising about harming herself.

I throw out the heavy nappy and walk towards the patio doors. I always toy with the idea of going right through the glass and cutting every inch of my body, always aiming to pass through my own shadow. But just before I hit it, I stop myself and slide it open.

It's a rendition of spiralling out of control, sometimes playing the part of mother, in front of friends on the odd occasion they're invited to a birthday party or playing the daughter in law at a family gathering, but not too hard, because it is impossible, the insanity too close to be able to sustain any form of denial for too long a period of time.

When my husband's away, every second of silence is followed by a hoard of demons infiltrating my brain.

If she's not going crazy from the silence, she's targeting the weak, aggressing the overweight nurse who comes to tend to the neighbour, acting haughty with the women working in the supermarket, the pizza delivery men, the manicurists.

I yell at them in public. I like to make a scene, humiliate them, show them how cowardly they are. Because that's what they are: chickens. How come none of them have tried to fight me? How come none of them have called the authorities to have me deported?

As a reader, I can't help asking questions, like, what is this? Is this postpartum depression? No, this was a pre-existing condition that started before she gave birth, that continued afterwards and seems never to have ended.
Is this the result of leaving her education, her intellectual self behind? Of embracing motherhood? Of being separated from her country, culture, her family, the way of her own people? Those things are never ever mentioned, never alluded too, never missed, there is no nostalgia for the past, only a visceral disgust for the present, a desire for a future where she is taken out, extinguished.

We were only just waking up from the weekend and already we were fighting. At half past eight I let out the first scream, at nine-twenty I threatened to leave, and at nine-fifty I said I'd make his life a living hell. By ten past ten, I was standing like a ram in the middle of the road with my straw hat on, suitcase in hand and flies in my eardrums.

She reflects that even if she were to get hit and killed will unlikely gain her sympathy, that will be saved for her poor child, left without a mother.

No one grieves for the wretched woman with scarred arms who was consumed by the misery of life.

She blames desire, calls it a destructive hunger, an alarm, ferocious.

Not even digging a hole, a pit, would be enough. it needs to be thrown into the desert and devoured by wild beasts. Desire that is.

I waver between wondering if this is something a woman will experience if the circumstances are created that deprive her of the things she needs for sustenance, or is this a woman creating what she perceives as art, an art form that is designed to shock, to provoke a response in its audience.

When asked about her inspiration Arian Harwicz responded:

Motherhood as a form of prison, a trap, an ordinary destiny. Writing the novel was a chance to escape that.

When asked about herself:

I always say that I was born when I wrote Die, My Love. Before then, I was alive, in the same way that everybody is alive, yet for me that is not really being alive. I had recently had a baby, I had moved to live in the countryside next to a forest. I would watch the thunderstorms, I would go horse-riding, but that was not life for me. And then I wrote Die, My Love, immersed in that desperation between death and desire. Die, My Love comes from that. I wasn’t aware I was writing a novel. I was not a writer, rather, I was saving myself, slowly lifting my head out of the swamp with each line.

In a podcast with the London literary review, she expresses interest first and foremost in the question 'What is it, to be an artist?' and her response to her own question is:

An artist, is someone who is willing to break tradition, convention and transgress outside the norm

This is what she succeeds in doing in Die, My Love. She pursues it with intellectual vigour, with a bold, unapologetic, Argentinian energy that busts out of convention, leaves the old form of language and expression behind, takes her literary weapons into the forest and wreaks havoc on the page and in the mind of the reader.

[Marijana☕✨ · Rating 2 out of 5]

„U izvesnom trenutku pojavljuje se jelen, koji zastaje i gleda me tako divlje kako me niko nikada nije gledao. Poželela sam da ga zagrlim, ali to nije bilo moguće.“

Znala sam da će ovo biti samo zbog korica! Nisam sigurna da znam šta sam tačno pročitala, ali pošto ovde jeste bila poenta da se prikaže mentalna labilnost jedne žene, onda je stilski dobro izvedeno, samo meni nije leglo.
Priča prati novopečenu majku koja to ne želi da bude, ali očigledno je da ne želi da bude ni žena svome mužu. Zarobljena je u nekom selu i njeni iracionalni postupci vape za pomoću koja ne dolazi. Najbližima je lakše da ignorišu ili da prosto zauzmu stav koji njima odgovara. Depresija, koja je sigurno bila prisutna i pre postporođajne, duboko ukorenjeno nezadovoljstvo, zatočenost u braku koji deluje kao neka sprdačina (uopšte mi nije jasno zašto se odlučila na život sa tim likom), njena sveprisutna napaljenost koja se sofisticirano naziva žudnjom... sve to izaziva neverovatnu teskobu kod čitaoca.
Tema je važna i važno je da govorimo o tome da žene treba da biraju da li će i kada da rode dete. Ipak, način na koji je obrađena mi nije bio dovoljno dobar. U meni nije probudilo nijednu emociju osim već spomenute teskobe. Žao mi je što nismo dobili deliće prošlosti, ali pitanje je koliko bi i to doprinelo da se malo više investiram u celu priču koja broji 133 stranice.

[merixien · Rating 3 out of 5]

Yazarın kendine has (şiirsel ve sembolik) dili ile bu kadar sert bir konu birleştiğinde okurken yorucu, yıpratıcı bir kitap çıkmış ortaya. Kitabı devamlı stabil bir dikkatle takip etmeniz gerekiyor zira yine yazarın tarzından kaynaklı olarak konuşan kişinin ya da perspektifin değiştiğini çok zor takip ediyorsunuz. Bu karmaşanın ortasında konuya baktığınızda evet ilk başlarda -ilk 40-50 sayfada- gerçekten etkileyici başlıyor ama bir yerden sonra kendi etrafında dönüp yeni şeyler eklemeyi bırakıyor. İnce bir kitap olduğu için bitirebildim ancak daha kalın bir kitap olsaydı muhtemelen okumayı bırakırdım. Eğer doğum sonrası annelik ve kadınlık buhranlarına dair gerçekten etkileyici bir şeyler okumak isterseniz Sarı Duvar Kağıdı ya da yerlilerden Otopsi kitabını okursanız çok daha tatmin edici bir okuma yapmış olursunuz. Açıkcası bu kitaba dair de çok büyük bir beklentim vardı, beklediğimi alamadım, o yüzden de pek sevemedim.

[Rebecca · Rating 4 out of 5]

This intense Argentinian novella, originally published in 2012 and nominated for this year’s Republic of Consciousness and Man Booker International Prizes, is an inside look at postpartum depression as it shades into what looks like full-blown psychosis. We never learn the name of our narrator, just that she’s a foreigner living in France (like Harwicz herself) and has a husband and young son. The stream-of-consciousness chapters are each composed of a single paragraph that stretches over two or more pages. From the first page onwards, we get the sense that this character is on the edge: as she’s hanging laundry outside, she imagines a sun shaft as a knife in her hand. But for now she’s still in control. “I wasn’t going to kill them. I dropped the knife and went to hang out the washing like nothing had happened.”

Not a lot happens over the course of the book; what’s more important is to be immersed in this character’s bitter and perhaps suicidal or sadistic outlook. But there are a handful of concrete events. Her father-in-law has recently died, so she tells of his funeral and what she perceives as his sad little life. Her husband brings home a stray dog that comes to a bad end. Their son attends a children’s party and they take along a box of pastries that melt in the heat.

The only escape from this woman’s mind is a chapter from the point of view of a neighbor, a married radiologist with a disabled daughter who passes her each day on his motorcycle and desires her. With such an unreliable narrator, though, it’s hard to know whether the relationship they strike up is real. This woman is racked by sexual fantasies, but doesn’t seem to be having much sex; when she does, it’s described in disturbing terms: “He opened my legs. He poked around with his calloused hands. Desire is the last thing there is in my cries.”

The language is jolting and in-your-face, but often very imaginative as well. Harwicz has achieved the remarkable feat of showing a mind in the process of cracking up. It’s all very strange and unnerving, and I found that the reading experience required steady concentration. But if you find the passages below intriguing, you’ll want to seek out this top-class translation from new Edinburgh-based publisher Charco Press. It’s the first book in what Harwicz calls “an involuntary trilogy” and has earned her comparisons to Virginia Woolf.

“My mind is somewhere else, like I’ve been startled awake by a nightmare. I want to drive down the road and not stop when I reach the irrigation ditch.”

“I take off my sleep costume, my poisonous skin. I recover my sense of smell and my eyelashes, go back to pronouncing words and swallowing. I look at myself in the mirror and see a different person to yesterday. I’m not a mother.”

“The look I’m going for is Zelda Fitzgerald en route to Switzerland, and not for the chocolate or watches, either.”

Originally published on my blog, Bookish Beck.

[Federico Sosa Machó · Rating 4 out of 5]

Qué intensidad, por favor. Breve y brutal es esta novela que nos muestra a una protagonista en (no sé bien cómo llamarlo) una situación de crisis. Creo ver en ella a una contemporánea Madame Bovary pero potenciada por una carga libidinal que no se sacia nunca, que reclama dejar fluir su animalidad desenfrenada. Podría incluso interpretarse en clave romántica y ver una dimensión existencial que plasma una insatisfacción perpetua, que solo encuentra un camino en la huida. En fin, mil cosas más podrían decirse de una novela que se construye a partir de un lenguaje incisivo, que plasma una imaginería poblada de animales para tratar de apresar lo inapresable, que es esa subjetividad atormentada que, como dice el texto, reclama un búfalo y recibe un puercoespín. Que presenta a una mujer en busca de liberación o anhelante de sometimiento. Todo eso, y más, en un texto polisémico, ambiguo y contundente, que nos invita a seguir leyendo a la autora.

[Coos Burton · Rating 4 out of 5]

Fue un viaje por la mente de una mujer aquejada por mil cuestiones comunes, y otras no tan comunes. Sí me mantuvo tensa, no sabía en qué iba a terminar todo.

[Andrea Gumes · Rating 5 out of 5]

el dolor aliè a vegades pot ser bàlsam per altres i aquest és el cas, el deixaré ben a prop perquè quan senti que arriba aquella bogeria que no té explicació tornaré a ell, i el rellegiré i rellegiré i rellegiré