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Die My Love

Ariana Harwicz · Charco Press · 2017 · 110 pp

Novela · Traducción

In a patch of dilapidated French countryside, a woman struggles with the demons of her multitudinous internal conflicts. Embracing exclusion, yet desiring to belong, craving freedom whilst feeling trapped, yearning for family life and yet wanting to burn the entire façade down. Given surprising leeway by her family for her increasingly erratic behaviour, she instead feels ever more incarcerated, stifled. Motherhood, womanhood, the mechanization of love, the inexplicable brutality of having “your heart live in someone else’s”; these questions are faced with raw intensity. It is not a question of whether a breaking point will be reached, but rather when - and how violent a form will it take? 

Brutal and wild; it is almost impossible to come out unscathed after reading Ariana Harwicz. The language of Die, My Love feels like a scalpel, finding its splendour in its cinematographic expression, evoking the likes of John Cassavetes, David Lynch and John Ford. As one critic put it, Harwicz does not write, she vomits, moulding language, submitting it to her own volition in an irreverent style of prose. Bruising and confrontational, yet anchored by an unapologetic beauty, Die, My Love delivers a unique reading experience that very quickly becomes addictive.  This book is part of the longlist of the International Booker Prize in 2018.