Die, my Love

My first impression after putting this down was that I had just finished an incredibly brave novel. Harwicz goes after the most vulnerable part of herself through the crafting of her protagonist and the language is utterly gorgeous. The work is so emotionally intense that I really appreciated the "small bites" chapters and found myself wanting to read more and more and more when the novel concluded. I will certainly be seeking out more, fortunately that is now an option for English readers thanks to Charco Press.

My mind is spent, it’s lost on the river bank. When I finally go in, the food will be cold on the counter and there’ll be a note in his writing saying ‘Enjoy your dinner, I love you’. By the end of the night, I’ve built up so much rage that I could drink until I have a heart attack. That’s what I tell myself but it’s not true. I couldn’t even down half a bottle. My days are all like this. Endlessly stagnant. A slow downfall.

It would be easy to dispel this book as a simple she-experienced-this-it's-no-real-tour-de-force, but it fucking is. I mean, the author may or may not have lived through some of what's found in here but it's a real barrel of turns and tussles, alright.

A lot of dialogue directed towards the main character, mostly from her husband, is not barbed with emotion, but factual counts of what's really said to her. However, her own thoughts are to me the jewels in the crown:

Instead of a vagina, he thought his wife had a stone in the depths of a cave.

When I fall in love, like this very minute, as I shake myself, I scatter earth onto a coffin. It doesn’t matter whose. And when I masturbate I desecrate crypts, and when I rock my baby I say amen, and when I smile I unplug an iron lung. Hence the kiss. Because after all, since forever and since even before being born, and for the whole time my husband’s been shouting with jealous rage, I’ve been dead.

Here's a paragraph that's telling of the entire book, which is only about 100 pages long:

Open the door, please, we’ll do it after, I promise. He’s bribing me, but screw him. I’m begging you, it’s not funny. And then, having climbed onto the toilet, I deliver a lengthy existential monologue, adding some philosophical and psychoanalytic touches for good measure. When I’m done, he says: It’s all in your head. That’s all he ever says. In the end I feel sorry for him and leave the bathroom. He gives me an insipid kiss that does nothing for me. I need a buffalo and all I get is a porcupine. He shoves me away from the bathroom door. I hear him defecate, the sound of his shit dropping into the water. I wait for him in bed, try to read something, but all I can think about is satiating my body: it’s chasing after me, sweating. I toss the book aside. The baby is all twisted up in his sleep, coughing like a worker in a Cuban tobacco factory. I straighten him out and decide to go to sleep. My husband is still in the bathroom, playing on his phone. I end up taking off my bra, the underwire hurts, and changing out of my knickers. I scrub my face clean and slather on some lotion. Afterwards, nothing. At dawn, I’m woken by a shrill, trumpet-like scream. A strange whistling sound. The fire in the living room has gone out. I blow on it but that just sends ash flying everywhere, including up my nose. I spit. I sneeze. I have an allergic reaction. Nasal blood. I try to light the fire. The uproar continues outside. Men and animals are fighting it out. A chicken truck has crashed into a car carrying an average family, two point four children in a pile-up. Or it’s a kangaroo giving birth to a troop of joeys and they’ve got stuck on the way out. I leave the house barefoot. I get soaked, slip on the stones, look for the source of the tumult of voices and growls. I walk down the road, through the woods and to the stretch of wasteland scattered with used condoms where the tourists go to procreate. It’s coming from the sky. Hundreds of birds are criss-crossing each other, confused. No one’s leading them. North and south are mixed up. The baby is crying his quota of morning torment. He’s had his nightmare about a hungry wolf climbing in through the window. There’s no smoke detector in his room. I put him to bed with my husband. I wrap their arms around each other and they lie there, sound asleep, breathing the air from each other’s mouths. My vampiric offspring is going to end up a smoker. I go back outside. For the first time, I feel drawn to the sky. The birds are raising the feathers on their wings, they’re riled up like bulls. Then one of them heads south and the rest follow, screeching off into the distance. Back in the house I find the baby under our bed, screaming at the top of his lungs like another bird. I don’t know what we’re doing with our tiny deformity, with our flesh. What we’re doing with our conjoined entrails. We’re letting him grow up among shrubs and bones. We’re letting him get scraped and knocked about. How could you leave him there when you can see I’m sleeping, he said. Are you out of your mind? Then he drifted off again. I lay down between my husband and my son and watched them inhale and exhale as they abandoned themselves to the heavy breathing of sleep. I looked at one face and then at the other, and then at myself in the middle. I eventually got bored of their features and was alarmed to find that, after staring at them for so long, I no longer recognised them.

All in all, the book's a dark, torn, terrifying tale of ennui and heartbreaking happenings, and I like it.

My mind is spent, it’s lost on the river bank. When I finally go in, the food will be cold on the counter and there’ll be a note in his writing saying ‘Enjoy your dinner, I love you’. By the end of the night, I’ve built up so much rage that I could drink until I have a heart attack. That’s what I tell myself but it’s not true. I couldn’t even down half a bottle. My days are all like this. Endlessly stagnant. A slow downfall.

It would be easy to dispel this book as a simple she-experienced-this-it's-no-real-tour-de-force, but it fucking is. I mean, the author may or may not have lived through some of what's found in here but it's a real barrel of turns and tussles, alright.A lot of dialogue directed towards the main character, mostly from her husband, is not barbed with emotion, but factual counts of what's really said to her. However, her own thoughts are to me the jewels in the crown:

Instead of a vagina, he thought his wife had a stone in the depths of a cave.

When I fall in love, like this very minute, as I shake myself, I scatter earth onto a coffin. It doesn’t matter whose. And when I masturbate I desecrate crypts, and when I rock my baby I say amen, and when I smile I unplug an iron lung. Hence the kiss. Because after all, since forever and since even before being born, and for the whole time my husband’s been shouting with jealous rage, I’ve been dead.

Here's a paragraph that's telling of the entire book, which is only about 100 pages long:

Open the door, please, we’ll do it after, I promise. He’s bribing me, but screw him. I’m begging you, it’s not funny. And then, having climbed onto the toilet, I deliver a lengthy existential monologue, adding some philosophical and psychoanalytic touches for good measure. When I’m done, he says: It’s all in your head. That’s all he ever says. In the end I feel sorry for him and leave the bathroom. He gives me an insipid kiss that does nothing for me. I need a buffalo and all I get is a porcupine. He shoves me away from the bathroom door. I hear him defecate, the sound of his shit dropping into the water. I wait for him in bed, try to read something, but all I can think about is satiating my body: it’s chasing after me, sweating. I toss the book aside. The baby is all twisted up in his sleep, coughing like a worker in a Cuban tobacco factory. I straighten him out and decide to go to sleep. My husband is still in the bathroom, playing on his phone. I end up taking off my bra, the underwire hurts, and changing out of my knickers. I scrub my face clean and slather on some lotion. Afterwards, nothing. At dawn, I’m woken by a shrill, trumpet-like scream. A strange whistling sound. The fire in the living room has gone out. I blow on it but that just sends ash flying everywhere, including up my nose. I spit. I sneeze. I have an allergic reaction. Nasal blood. I try to light the fire. The uproar continues outside. Men and animals are fighting it out. A chicken truck has crashed into a car carrying an average family, two point four children in a pile-up. Or it’s a kangaroo giving birth to a troop of joeys and they’ve got stuck on the way out. I leave the house barefoot. I get soaked, slip on the stones, look for the source of the tumult of voices and growls. I walk down the road, through the woods and to the stretch of wasteland scattered with used condoms where the tourists go to procreate. It’s coming from the sky. Hundreds of birds are criss-crossing each other, confused. No one’s leading them. North and south are mixed up. The baby is crying his quota of morning torment. He’s had his nightmare about a hungry wolf climbing in through the window. There’s no smoke detector in his room. I put him to bed with my husband. I wrap their arms around each other and they lie there, sound asleep, breathing the air from each other’s mouths. My vampiric offspring is going to end up a smoker. I go back outside. For the first time, I feel drawn to the sky. The birds are raising the feathers on their wings, they’re riled up like bulls. Then one of them heads south and the rest follow, screeching off into the distance. Back in the house I find the baby under our bed, screaming at the top of his lungs like another bird. I don’t know what we’re doing with our tiny deformity, with our flesh. What we’re doing with our conjoined entrails. We’re letting him grow up among shrubs and bones. We’re letting him get scraped and knocked about. How could you leave him there when you can see I’m sleeping, he said. Are you out of your mind? Then he drifted off again. I lay down between my husband and my son and watched them inhale and exhale as they abandoned themselves to the heavy breathing of sleep. I looked at one face and then at the other, and then at myself in the middle. I eventually got bored of their features and was alarmed to find that, after staring at them for so long, I no longer recognised them.

All in all, the book's a dark, torn, terrifying tale of ennui and heartbreaking happenings, and I like it.

My mind is spent, it’s lost on the river bank. When I finally go in, the food will be cold on the counter and there’ll be a note in his writing saying ‘Enjoy your dinner, I love you’. By the end of the night, I’ve built up so much rage that I could drink until I have a heart attack. That’s what I tell myself but it’s not true. I couldn’t even down half a bottle. My days are all like this. Endlessly stagnant. A slow downfall.

It would be easy to dispel this book as a simple she-experienced-this-it's-no-real-tour-de-force, but it fucking is. I mean, the author may or may not have lived through some of what's found in here but it's a real barrel of turns and tussles, alright.A lot of dialogue directed towards the main character, mostly from her husband, is not barbed with emotion, but factual counts of what's really said to her. However, her own thoughts are to me the jewels in the crown:

Instead of a vagina, he thought his wife had a stone in the depths of a cave.

When I fall in love, like this very minute, as I shake myself, I scatter earth onto a coffin. It doesn’t matter whose. And when I masturbate I desecrate crypts, and when I rock my baby I say amen, and when I smile I unplug an iron lung. Hence the kiss. Because after all, since forever and since even before being born, and for the whole time my husband’s been shouting with jealous rage, I’ve been dead.

Here's a paragraph that's telling of the entire book, which is only about 100 pages long:

Open the door, please, we’ll do it after, I promise. He’s bribing me, but screw him. I’m begging you, it’s not funny. And then, having climbed onto the toilet, I deliver a lengthy existential monologue, adding some philosophical and psychoanalytic touches for good measure. When I’m done, he says: It’s all in your head. That’s all he ever says. In the end I feel sorry for him and leave the bathroom. He gives me an insipid kiss that does nothing for me. I need a buffalo and all I get is a porcupine. He shoves me away from the bathroom door. I hear him defecate, the sound of his shit dropping into the water. I wait for him in bed, try to read something, but all I can think about is satiating my body: it’s chasing after me, sweating. I toss the book aside. The baby is all twisted up in his sleep, coughing like a worker in a Cuban tobacco factory. I straighten him out and decide to go to sleep. My husband is still in the bathroom, playing on his phone. I end up taking off my bra, the underwire hurts, and changing out of my knickers. I scrub my face clean and slather on some lotion. Afterwards, nothing. At dawn, I’m woken by a shrill, trumpet-like scream. A strange whistling sound. The fire in the living room has gone out. I blow on it but that just sends ash flying everywhere, including up my nose. I spit. I sneeze. I have an allergic reaction. Nasal blood. I try to light the fire. The uproar continues outside. Men and animals are fighting it out. A chicken truck has crashed into a car carrying an average family, two point four children in a pile-up. Or it’s a kangaroo giving birth to a troop of joeys and they’ve got stuck on the way out. I leave the house barefoot. I get soaked, slip on the stones, look for the source of the tumult of voices and growls. I walk down the road, through the woods and to the stretch of wasteland scattered with used condoms where the tourists go to procreate. It’s coming from the sky. Hundreds of birds are criss-crossing each other, confused. No one’s leading them. North and south are mixed up. The baby is crying his quota of morning torment. He’s had his nightmare about a hungry wolf climbing in through the window. There’s no smoke detector in his room. I put him to bed with my husband. I wrap their arms around each other and they lie there, sound asleep, breathing the air from each other’s mouths. My vampiric offspring is going to end up a smoker. I go back outside. For the first time, I feel drawn to the sky. The birds are raising the feathers on their wings, they’re riled up like bulls. Then one of them heads south and the rest follow, screeching off into the distance. Back in the house I find the baby under our bed, screaming at the top of his lungs like another bird. I don’t know what we’re doing with our tiny deformity, with our flesh. What we’re doing with our conjoined entrails. We’re letting him grow up among shrubs and bones. We’re letting him get scraped and knocked about. How could you leave him there when you can see I’m sleeping, he said. Are you out of your mind? Then he drifted off again. I lay down between my husband and my son and watched them inhale and exhale as they abandoned themselves to the heavy breathing of sleep. I looked at one face and then at the other, and then at myself in the middle. I eventually got bored of their features and was alarmed to find that, after staring at them for so long, I no longer recognised them.

All in all, the book's a dark, torn, terrifying tale of ennui and heartbreaking happenings, and I like it.

Ariana Harwicz’s book Die, My Love is the type of novel that will leave you emotionally drained. Translated from the Spanish by Sarah Moses & Carolina Orloff, this is a powerful portrayal of a woman trapped in motherhood. Having recently given birth to her second child, all she yearns for is freedom. Never have I read a novel that is so raw with emotion.

Whether or not this woman is suffering from postnatal depression or not is not something I wish to debate. I wonder if trying to diagnose her would sell this book short. She is going through so many different emotions and never holds back with her feelings. Die, My Love feels like a gut punch of emotions. A novel that is to be experienced more than analysed.

There is no doubt in my mind that this is an autobiographical novel. I cannot imagine Ariana Harwicz being able to write this without living the experience. There is an intensity in the writing that never feels fake. The conflicting emotions of yearning for freedom mixed with her motherly instincts hold the narrative together. The connection with nature stems from her constant desire to be free but also a reference to a child’s carefree nature.

“I think about how a child is a wild animal, about another person carrying your heart forever.”

The narrative that Ariana Harwicz is able to weave is so affecting; we are able to follow this vivid portrayal of a mother and experience every single emotion and thought, no matter how dark or disturbing it may be. There are many times where I feel like this protagonist is over sharing but that just adds to the raw and intense honesty. I was left in awe and have not been able to get the images from this novel out of my head. It will be a book that I will come back to again and again.

I have been going down a rabbit hole of Argentinian literature and Die, My Love seems to invoke a common style, often found in recent novellas from this great literary scene. It pleases me to see how many Argentinian women writers are getting their moment to shine and I expect to see more in the future. There is something about these books that are able to explore so much in such a short novel. For great Argentinian books by women including Die, My Love, look no further than Things We Lost in the Fire by Mariana Enríquez, Fever Dream by Samanta Schweblin and Savage Theories by Pola Oloixarac.

This review originally appeared on my blog; www.knowledgelost.org/book-reviews/genre/contemporary/die-my-love-by-ariana-harwicz/