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    Feebleminded
    Feebleminded
    Feebleminded
    Ebook107 pages1 hour

    Feebleminded

    By Ariana Harwicz

    4/5

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    About this ebook

    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.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherCharco Press
    Release dateMay 2, 2019
    ISBN9781916465671
    Feebleminded
    Author

    Ariana Harwicz

    Ariana Harwicz nació en Buenos Aires en 1977 y vive en el campo en Francia desde 2007. Su primera novela, Matate, amor (2012), fue publicada en inglés en 2017 bajo el título Die, My Love. Finalista del Primer Premio del Libro otorgado por la EIBF en 2017, del Premio República de la Conciencia y el Man Booker International en 2018 y del BTBA en 2020, Matate, amor ha sido adaptada al teatro y en 2024 será llevada al cine por Martin Scorsese, bajo la dirección de Lynne Ramsay y con Jennifer Lawrence como protagonista. Su cuarta novela, Degenerado, fue publicada por Anagrama en 2019. Sus obras han sido adaptadas al teatro en varios países de Latinoamérica y Europa. En 2021 publicó Desertar, un libro de conversaciones sobre traducción y deserción de la lengua materna escrito junto con Mikaël Gómez Guthart. Sus relatos figuran en medios como Harper's, Granta, Letras Libres, Babelia, The White Review, Brick, Paris Review, The New Yorker, La Quinzaine littéraire, Quimera y The Guardian, y en diversas antologías. Sus libros han sido traducidos a más de veinte lenguas. En 2022 Anagrama reunió, en un volumen titulado Trilogía de la pasión, sus tres primeras novelas. En 2023 ha publicado El ruido de una época, un ensayo acerca del Mal literario y las extorsiones contemporáneas. Asimismo ha escrito el libreto de la ópera Dementia, que se estrenará en el Teatro Colón de Buenos Aires en la temporada 2025.

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    • 4/5
      A short intense brutal story of the relationship between a mother and her daughter. Feebleminded explores issues of need, dependency, and love in a language and style that is ferocious in its execution leaving the reader drained by this assault on his senses that has just taken place.

      1 person found this helpful

    Book preview

    Feebleminded - Ariana Harwicz

    I

    I come from nowhere. The world is a cave, a stone heart

    crushing you, a horizontal vertigo. The world is a moon slashed by black whips, by arrows and gunfire. How far must I dig before striking disdain, before my days burn. I could have been born with white eyes like this forest of stark pines, and yet I’m woken by volcanic ash on the garden clover. And yet my mother’s pulling out clumps of hair and throwing them on the fire. The day begins, I’m a baby and my mother’s in her armchair with her back to me, crying. I wake up as a girl. Outside, the lavender; inside, mother, her black hair in the embers. Cuttings of cloud everywhere, low and pasty, high and fleeting, dark and nondescript. Sitting on my clit I invent a life for myself in the clouds. I quiver, I shake, my fingers are my morphine and for that brief moment everything’s fine. My hand inside is a thousand times his face inside me. How hard can you possess a face, how hard can you shove a face into your sex. For that moment, the grass is grass and I can run through the meadows. Of all the ways of being, I ended up with this one. I recognise nobody, and when I’m really desperate I live anywhere. My mother’s stopped crying. I can already walk on my own, I can already speak, we already share clothes. I want him to come back against all odds, against all grief. I want his eyes to unearth me until I see the treetops. My head takes a turn. My head is in freefall, entrenched. Suddenly I have the voice of a dead woman. My face swollen like an addict in the bath, the epic body of a woman about to leap into the void. Suddenly I realise it’s midday. The blue eyes of the hares shine cold and I go outside to eat, but it’s already over. I begin to pray, or is it that I’m in love. I ask him to spit on me, to crush my face with a slap. I stare at him. I’m not crazy, just possessed, the answer’s always the same. Mum, I’m bored. My brain is moths in a jar, hanging themselves.

    My mum and the guy grab each other by the neck and rub against the slippery concrete floor. The guy comes inside my mum looking skyward and so it all begins. Let’s put a microscope to my shapeless body on this afternoon thick with slow flies. People could hang it in the living room like an abstract painting. This is when the hot trees appear with their clammy leaves, and I hide from her. I hear her cry out. I’m tramping around on the hill, but where am I going. For now there’s just the noise of the wind at the top and snatches of song. For now the mysticism lasts and there are ants on my arm. If you like living in a dream so much why don’t you stay there, she grumbles, and shuts herself away. Without her, everything is smoke. This feverish childhood memory in a burnt-out car always comes back to me. My mother staring straight ahead, my mother on the back of my neck like a hard-shelled insect. My mother’s gaze while she smokes on the train’s torn fake-leather seat. Me, wide awake in the locked car, unable to speak, the neighbours calling the police. I move around tamely, where is he now. I crouch to kiss the ground. How is this possible: a relentless, niggling desire, the idiot cousin who comes to interrupt our al-fresco breakfasts of cream croissants and ends up throwing himself off the balcony. The idiot cousin who touches his nose and says nose. This epileptic desire, this deformed desire, a drooling lustful crip who needs two people to lift him and carry him like a cart so he can fuck on the soft mattress. And yet he’s got nothing else to do but fuck me, but want me from his chair. And yet the clear viscous halo on the mattress is proof that I’m alive. I get my finger ready but I overthink and faint. The thought of desire on top of desire itself leaves me unhinged, a parasite with eye bags down to my neck. Where are you, Mum, I’m sick of this. I’ve been on my feet working for the past nine hours, the staff need a break, you know. My mum, warm, very warm, hot and now she’s burnt. If she saw me like this she’d get a fright, the hatred I give off is something else. If you want to live in your dreams, suit yourself. She pokes her head out of her mousehole to insult me.

    Why are we so gormless at the display counters, not knowing what to eat? Why do we use shop-bought parsley and basil when they grow in the garden anyway? And we laugh. Death a tempting option when she drops the jars of herbs and spices and we have to pick them up one by one like pieces of a skeleton, dry garlic sticking to our fingers. Lying on the sand, on the short grass, the dry soil. No more fighting my mother’s arms. I try to concentrate on the taste of courgettes. They’re raw, I say. Barely sautéed, she replies, just a touch of olive oil. Look at the grass, the way it’s growing in patches, how strange. There are dry bits, as if only they caught the sun, and then sunken bits like marshes. A mystery, my dear, not worth worrying about. Eat up. Looks like the hens are hungry, they screech and screech. We eat. The hand goes back and forth from the mouth. Where’s my phone, mum. It’s not here. We said we’d do it and we’re doing it really well, both of us, add a little salt. I don’t ask about the thick-bottomed glasses either. Mum. He could have phoned. Concentrate. Stare at a point in space and eat up. Good idea to buy this rectangular table, wasn’t it? Not too expensive, and it came with the chairs. Maybe we could do with a parasol, a sun lounger even. Yellow or stripy? It’d be nice to add a bit of colour. They say colour brings life. What crap. How about polka-dots? I’m staring at a point in space. So? Nothing exists. He’s getting further away and it feels like a knife thrust in my gut. These images you fixate on are like junk food. Why don’t you think about the wide-eyed, cheerful little girl you were before you met him, when you used to build hospitals for dying ants? Please don’t ruin this meal. He’s made you so ungrateful, you rude little hussy. I’ve never been cheerful. I cook from scratch instead of reheating stuff and not a word of thanks.

    We clear the table surrounded by crickets. Lucky for me there’s no child around, one less plate, no congealed remains,

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