Die, My Love
SynopsisPlot
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?
Story
About this book
Ariana Harwicz is an Argentine writer who has lived in rural France, and that geography sits at the centre of this short, high-pressure novel. The unnamed narrator is a woman in a remote patch of French countryside, caught between opposing impulses. She wants to belong to her family and her surroundings, yet she also craves escape, and domestic life pulls against a volatile inner world.
Her family appears to tolerate her increasingly erratic behaviour, but that tolerance does not ease her sense of confinement. The novel traces how the ordinary textures of rural life, caregiving and partnership turn into sites of friction and dread. Harwicz writes in compressed, urgent prose, and the English translation by Sarah Moses and Carolina Orloff keeps that restless pace. The book does not ask whether pressure will pass a limit, but when.
Written first in Spanish, the novel reached English readers through Charco Press, an Edinburgh publisher devoted to contemporary Latin American writing in translation. Its subjects are motherhood, womanhood, desire and the strain of carrying another person's heart for good. The narration stays close to the woman's thoughts, so the fields and houses around her are registered mainly through her shifting attention.
