Argentine writer Ariana Harwich writes delicate books from a limited set of resources, as if she had pulled them from a narrow range of diseased crops or from the soil of a shallow grave. Its composite antihero is a mother who has gone mad from a rural village in France. There were probably flies in the folds of her kitchen curtains, and there was a machete left on the lawn. She is besieged from all sides: her husband's relatives, social workers, untreated psychosis– and at the same time enjoying terrible freedom. She would like to die, but she is inclined to kill someone else first. She is overcome by anger and lust, an alchemical compound capable of altering matter, energy and the laws of physics. Characters teleport, rewind themselves (the reader is often unsure where they are in time and space), and cross species boundaries. In HarwichDie my love“, the lover of the unraveling protagonist is introduced as a “crazy fox on the side of the road”; after she sleeps with him, she expects to “have a beak, feathers, claws.” Her superego, or perhaps id, keeps materializing in the form of a deer, and she sees her child through the eyes of a crab. Harwich's Narrator “Idiotdescribes his brain as “moths in a jar, hanging themselves.” The first line of another novel: “Gentle“I wake up with my mouth open, like a force-fed duck having its liver cut out for foie gras.”
Die, My Love, which was longlisted for the 2018 Man Booker International Prize and has been adapted into an upcoming film starring Jennifer Lawrence and Robert Pattinson, is Harwich's most famous work. It can fairly be categorized as a postpartum psychological horror, the transatlantic cousin of “Rachel Yoder.”Night bitch“, in which the tension between unfulfilled professional ambitions and maternal longing begins to turn a woman into a dog or into main story from the collection of Karen Russell”Orange world“, where an anxious, sleep-deprived young mother comes to the conclusion that she is breastfeeding Satan. These are essentially gothic works in which the dim isolation of the night opens the door to bizarre impulses and supernatural transformations.
Harwich's novels are hallucinatory rather than supernatural, but the more provocative difference between her books and others in this semi-subgenre is that, for her characters, motherhood does not so much provoke animal rage and instability as intensify it. At one point in Die, My Love, the unnamed protagonist sits back and watches her child crawl towards the fireplace and burn his hands; another time she shoves crackers into his mouth until he choke. One can assume that she has always been like this, only now she has a child. “Mom was happy before the baby was born,” she reflects. This is an unreliable narrator.
“unsuitable“Harwich's last novella to be published in English was published in Spanish last year under the title Perder el Juicio, which carries the double meaning of going crazy and losing your business. The distraught narrator, Lisa, like Harwich herself, is an Argentine Jew living in a small French village. She is accused of domestic violence (details) remain unclear) involving her ex-husband, Armand, the father of her five-year-old twin sons. Dozens of eyewitnesses spoke out against her, says Lisa, but these are “fake resistance fighters, denouncing collaborators, collaborators posing as heroes.” Arman and his parents take care of the twins, whom Lisa can see under supervision only once a month, “even less often than families terrorists,” she complains.
No one is on Lisa's side in what she perceives as a real war, especially her anti-Semitic relatives, who she believes reflect on the so-called Israelis among them: “I heard that they wear wigs and never wash their private parts, that they smell like cooking oil.” Despite a restraining order, Lisa sneaks around the twins' school and stalks them into the grocery store. She wants them back, apparently not so much out of primitive melancholy as out of anger or resentment that her rightful property was taken from her. Almost impulsively, Lisa sets fire to the house and yard adjacent to where Armand and the boys live with her in-laws; the fire lures the adults out of the house—“like rats from their secret lair,” Lisa thinks—and gives her the opportunity to sneak into the main house and get her boys back. What follows is a ride of sorts, although the reader is not always clear who is inside or outside the car.
All of Harwich's novels unfold rapidly, with a sense of effortless narrative ambiguity and spatial confusion. But “Unfit,” translated from Spanish by Jesse Mendez Sayer, feels particularly rushed and patchy with exceptions. These tendencies are most significant in the kidnapping scene, a clumsy set piece whose planning and execution seem to defy even dream logic. The ambiguity and disorientation are likely intentional and may be intended to cause the destruction of Lisa's sanity. How much the reader should sympathize with Lisa—whether the character Harwich creates is more likely to be seen as a resentful man lashing out at a man or a more self-aware villain—also seems unresolved.
Like many of Harwich's characters, Lisa is something of a fanatic and the personification of the author's unusual belief in the value and importance of hatred. “This era, to put it in literary language, does not know how to hate,” Harwich wroteon X, last year. In her books, anything that smacks of compassion or tenderness deserves, at best, strategic suspicion. “Love is bribery in the clear light of day,” says Lisa, “a locked emergency exit, fireworks aimed at the sky.” Love is virtue signaling, branding, a cynical transaction. Love is a commerce; hate is an art.
Harwich told interviewers that “Unfit” had echoes of her own divorce proceedings, during which she said she faced sexist and anti-Semitic discrimination, as well as the case of Sofia Troshinsky, an Argentine woman who fought an international custody battle with her French-born husband over their infant daughter; mother and child later disappeared. It also seems significant that Harwich, in recent months, has been completing work on the manuscript of The Unfit at October 7, 2023when Hamas launched its brutal attack about Israel—a cataclysm that Harwich says changed her view of her place in the world. “If I had to write my biography—my fictional life, another fiction book—I would start with October 7,” Harwich said.
Even a reader unfamiliar with this commentary could remember the events of October 7th while reading The Unfits, especially during the passage describing Lisa's abduction of her sons. Carrying the sleeping boys to her car, one after the other, she imagines herself “rescuing bodies from an ambush set up by fanatics.” She flees the scene, but in her mind the ambush is still ongoing: if “I had heard the fanatics approaching,” she thinks, “I would have hidden under other bodies.” She drives past ditches that are “filled with the metal skeletons of burnt-out, abandoned cars” and eagerly waits for the boys to wake up so they can celebrate the “successful hostage exchange.” She imagines candlelight vigils and frantic searches through charred ruins and digging tunnels. She sees missing persons posters. As she argues with Armand over the phone (Harwich is unclear about who is saying what), one spouse warns that the other will “soon understand the legal right to self-defense.”
