Die, My Love (Longlisted for The International Booker Prize 2018)

Man Booker International 2018 longlist

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 at the same time 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 inexplicable 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?

This is a brutal, wild book it s impossible to come out from reading Ariana Harwicz unscathed. The language of Die, My Love cuts like a scalpel even as it attains a kind of cinematic splendour, evoking the likes of John Cassavetes, David Lynch, Lars von Trier and John Ford. In a text that explores the destabilising effects of passion and its absence, immersed in the psyche of a female protagonist always on the verge of madness, in the tradition of Sylvia Plath and Clarice Lispector, Harwicz moulds language, submitting it to her will in irreverent prose. Bruising and confrontational, yet anchored in an unapologetic beauty and lyricism, Die, My Love is a unique reading experience that quickly becomes addictive.


Awards

Man Booker International Prize 2018 --Longlist
Republic of Consciousness Prize 2018 --Shortlist
Society of Authors Valle Inclán Prize 2018 --Shortlist
Internationaler Literaturpreis 2019 (Germany) --Shortlist


Reviews/Endorsements

"the over-all effect is exacting.... And yet "Die, My Love" isn't truly beholden to plot. The thrill is in the human as animal, and even as parasite. " --The New Yorker

"A touch of David Lynch." --The Guardian

"Unrestrained and unadorned, Harwicz's writing has a wild beauty.... A portrait of motherhood, passion, and mental illness that cuts to the bone." --Kirkus Reviews

"We are used to female narrators who occupy one of several familiar niches: blandly 'likeable', 'flawed', or pathological; murderers or abusers who are profiled with just enough sympathy to make us feel humane as we judge them. Harwicz takes us somewhere more profound and forces us to confront the thought that these easy fictional 'explanations' are specious. Lurking inside all of us is the potential for horror." --Hari Kunzru