Lisa has lost custody of her young twin boys. Caught between the French legal system's sluggish bureaucracy and her sinister, scheming in-laws, she's alone and lost, an Argentine migrant in rural France picking grapes for a pittance, only allowed to see her children in supervised visits once a month. Scapegoated and outcast, destitute and desperate, Lisa decides to take radical action: early one morning, she sneaks into her in-laws' farmhouse, takes back her children, sets the barn ablaze, and makes her escape. What follows is a white-knuckled road trip that explores human beings pushed to the edge.
Clearly, Lisa is not in her right mind, and as Harwicz deftly mingles a chorus of contradictory voices into her very unreliable narration, the reader comes to regard the protagonist with an unsettling mixture of sympathy and suspicion. Written in savage, chiseled prose, Unfit shoots off, a gripping chase that questions all our assumptions-and points out our hypocrisies-about motherhood, custody rights, love, violence, antisemitism, and migration. The latest novel by the acclaimed author of Die, My Love (soon to be adapted to a film starring Jennifer Lawrence), Unfit is addictively terrifying, savagely sophisticated, and shockingly brilliant.
Rezensionen / Stimmen
"Harwicz spins an unrelenting tale of a migrant woman who takes drastic steps to fulfill her radical conception of motherly love... Harwicz's assured pacing is bolstered by her gorgeous and often darkly funny prose, immaculately translated by Mendez Sayer. The result is a wild and unforgettable ride." -- Publishers Weekly (starred review) "There is no question or fear about whether something terrible will occur, only the straight and dreadful flight toward it. So assured is the totality of destruction that the author need not name its cause. A violent, delirious blur." -- Kirkus Reviews "Celebrating lust and bolshiness with an intensity worthy of Clarice Lispector." -- The Times Literary Supplement "Dangerously addictive." -- The Guardian
Sprache
Verlagsort
Produkt-Hinweis
Broschur/Paperback
Klebebindung
Maße
Höhe: 203 mm
Breite: 137 mm
Dicke: 10 mm
Gewicht
ISBN-13
978-0-8112-3889-2 (9780811238892)
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Klassifikation
The fiercely independent writer and thinker Ariana Harwicz (b. 1977, Argentina) studied comparative literature at the Sorbonne. The author of Die My Love, Feebleminded, and Precious, Harwicz has been translated into 20 languages, and Die, My Love was longlisted for the Booker International Prize. Jessie Mendez Sayer is an British/Venezuelan translator who has been living and working in Mexico City since 2017. Her translations include The Untameable by Guillermo Arriaga and The Last Days of El Comandante by Alberto Barrera Tyszka.
