Feebleminded - by Ariana Harwicz (Paperback)

About the Book

The unraveling of a mother/daughter relationship that is at once chaotic, loving, and mercilessly destructive.

Book Synopsis

Following the international success of Die, My Love (longlisted for the Man Booker International Prize 2018), Ariana Harwicz again takes us into the darkest recesses of the imagination with this delirious, furious account of a mother and daughter bound by chaos as much as love. Driven to the edge by the men in their lives, they oscillate between erratic bursts of housework, lazing in the garden, and drunken escapades. But is the constant undercurrent of violence all in the daughter's mind or will they actually go through with their plan for revenge? With a shocking, edge-of-the-seat finale worthy of Thelma & Louise if it were remade by David Lynch, Feebleminded is a wild ride of a novel with echoes of Ágota Kristóf, Elfriede Jelinek and Alan Warner, and will leave you both shaken and begging for more.

Review Quotes

"Dangerously addictive." --The Guardian

"A precise, intense, ruthless mosaic that demands we read carefully, never quickly." --Literary Hub

"Celebrating lust and bolshiness with an intensity worthy of Clarice Lispector." --The Times Literary Supplement

"Harwicz succeeds in luring the reader into the darker aspects of the human mind." --Publishers Weekly

"Ariana Harwicz is the real deal, the very definition of an artist."" --Adam Biles, author of FEEDING TIME

"Ariana Harwicz is wet respite from deathless, sexless, bloodless art. "" --Melissa Broder, author of THE PISCES and SO SAD TODAY

"Ariana Harwicz is an intensely passionate and fearless writer whose irresistible prose deserves to be read far and wide."" --Claire-Louise Bennett, author of POND

"A kick up the arse to the literary novel. Feebleminded disassembles form, sensibility, everything... at once a riot (a revolution!) and a headtrip."" --Joanna Walsh, author of VERTIGO and BREAK.UP

"Harwicz achieves an asphyxiating writing, saturated with images of great beauty despite their disturbing character." --El País

"The acoustic quality of her prose, the pulse of her voice, the intensity of her imagery make her subjects so daring, so relentless, so damned and unconventional - very hard to drop or ever to forget."" --Lina Meruane, author of FALSE CALM

"Unrelenting and unforgettable, the Argentine author's latest novel is a breathtaking, hectic ride, as well as a strangely exhilarating story that confirms her as one of the most formidable writers at work today." --Jeremy Garber, Powell's Bookshop

Globetrotting: Your sneak preview of books in translation --New York Times

"This is a novel whose characters's conflicts spill out of the page and into the prose used to tell their story, making for a searing read." --Volume 1 Brooklyn

"Feebleminded is a nuclear bomb of recent literature from Argentina, a book of exceptional power with febrile characters." --Pagina/12

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Praise for Ariana Harwicz

Man Booker International Prize (Longlist)
Society of Authors Valle-Inclán Prize (Shortlist)
Best Translated Book Award (Finalist)
Internationaler Literaturpreis (Shortlist)
Republic of Consciousness Prize (Shortlist)

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

"Celebrating lust and bolshiness with an intensity worthy of Clarice Lispector." --The Times Literary Supplement

"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

"Die, My Love is impressive for the force of the narrator's insatiable rage, which fragments the boundaries of the self. [Anne Enright]" --New York Review of Books

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

"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, author of THE IMPRESSIONIST and GODS WITHOUT MEN

"The prose of Ariana Harwicz embarks on a vertiginous linguistic journey that joyfully shreds all vestiges of common sense."" --María Sonia Cristoff, author of FALSE CALM

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About the Author

Compared to Nathalie Sarraute and Virginia Woolf, Ariana Harwicz is one of the most radical figures in contemporary Argentinian literature. Her prose is characterised by its violence, eroticism, irony and criticism of the clichés surrounding the notions of the family and conventional relationships. Born in Buenos Aires in 1977, Harwicz studied screenwriting and drama in Argentina, and earned a degree in Performing Arts from the University of Paris VII as well as a Masters in comparative literature from the Sorbonne. She has taught screenwriting and written plays, which have been staged in Buenos Aires. Charco Press has published three of her books, which together form an 'involuntary trilogy': Die, My Love, Feebleminded and Tender . Die, My Love was longlisted for the Man Booker International Prize (2018) and shortlisted for the Republic of Consciousness Prize (2018). It has been translated into more than ten languages.

Originally from Buenos Aires and now based in Edinburgh, Carolina Orloff is an experienced translator and researcher in Latin American literature. In 2016, Carolina co-founded Charco Press, where she acts as Publishing Director and Chief Editor. She is also the co-translator of Ariana Harwicz's novels Die, My Love, Feebleminded and Tender, and of Jorge Consiglio's Fate .

Annie McDermott is the translator of a dozen books from Spanish and Portuguese, by such writers as Mario Levrero, Ariana Harwicz, Brenda Lozano, Fernanda Trías and Lídia Jorge. She was awarded the Premio Valle-Inclán for her translation of Wars of the Interior by Joseph Zárate, and her translation of Brickmakers by Selva Almada was shortlisted for the Warwick Prize for Women in Translation. In 2024 her translation of Selva Almada's novel Not a River was shortlisted for the International Booker Prize. She has previously lived in Mexico City and São Paulo, and is now based in Hastings in the UK.