Feebleminded
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- $21.99
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- $21.99
Publisher Description
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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Harwicz's blazing and unnerving follow-up to Die, My Love, the second in a trilogy, focuses on a volatile mother-daughter relationship. The unnamed narrator, a young woman, careens the reader through wild, nearly impenetrable stream-of-consciousness prose in a story that contains no names for characters or places. The narrator, who lives with her mother, is forever waiting for the married man she's been sleeping with. Harwicz centers the narrator and the mother as sexual beings, "both in heat from the scalp down." The narrator traces her own life and her mother's through each of their sexual exploits, beginning at the moment of her own conception. The women's days are filled with physical excess, from their constant masturbation to gorging on rotten food and being sick afterwards. An undercurrent of violence persists throughout, including a rape fantasy, and the violence looms larger when the narrator discovers her lover's wife is pregnant. She fantasizes about all the ways the woman's pregnancy could go wrong, and longs for her own death. Then the mother learns about the narrator's heartache, and the two conspire to enact bloody vengeance. A slow start and unhinged narration make for challenging reading, but once the story gets going, it pays off with dividends. Harwicz succeeds in luring the reader into the darker aspects of the human mind.
