Yes in Degenerate (2019) the matter that Ariana Harwicz (Buenos Aires, 1977) wanted to narrate was the corrupt voice of a pedophile accused of killing a little girl, now in Lose your mind faces the suffocating voice of a woman who “has been sentenced to prison in France for the kidnapping of her twin sons, Jonay and Elías Fournier.”
The Argentine writer once again places at the center of this novel of just over a hundred pages the emotional hurricane of a character for whom life is a whirlwinda life that “takes a long time” […] to become real, sometimes it never ends up becoming real.
And it is that a certain air of unreality weighs in this book that deals with redesign affections of fierce lives that know that “love is a malicious havoc” and that a relationship often means “bringing the other down as much as possible” and that “if it exists, everything can exist, every form of love is rape because we never know anything about what the other ultimately wants.
A weakened life
It is not about giving birth to an allegorical text or one with epic overtones, but rather about delimiting the contours of a female figure stirred up by all the semes of the word love, converted into the powerful center of the story, providing the reader with a unique and very everyday look at the actions that can be carried out from a weakened life. Show to what extent the experience of maternal, paternal or filial conjugal love can become “a compensation, a revenge”, a love that can make you lose your mind (the psychic and the legal) and which is described here as “hundreds of aggressive monkeys that loot believers at the door of a Buddhist temple.” “Any mother who has her children’s hands cut off or taken to the other side of the wall would have done this and more. I don’t say mother because it is not a proof of love. The law does not understand, the judges do not understand,” Add.
Harwicz wanted bring your own experience to writing, that of his divorce in France, where he resides, and in which fragments of his work were read against him. As if we had not learned from the trials against Gustave Flaubert and Madame Bovaryagainst James Joyce and Ulisesas if we still did not understand that in the literature There is no morality to attack or defend, that novel It is a battlefield where narrow-mindedness has no place.
Here the time is different, of course, and the insistent thing that is drawn is the importance of understanding a text in which one glimpses a tragedy without heroesthe hard struggle where “love is a fateful itinerary, a genetically altered face. I threw him into the river for love. In the name of love he did what he did. He groped her because he loved her too much, it wasn’t enough for him to be a father, he didn’t care. was enough with conventional love […]. “Love is the ultimate helplessness.”
Lose your mind does not keep in the center the description of the reasons that led to Lisa Trejmanmother, Jewish and foreign, to kidnap your childrendoes not seek to shape the ins and outs of a limit experience and make love a healing and redeeming cause, but rather understands better, more subtly, the voice, tone and perspective of the speaker populated by a demanding and dialectical loneliness to end by saying that the most difficult thing to tell is the everyday.
