Harwicz’s short novel brought to mind her compatriot Schweblin’s Fever Dream. Both novels are set in a menacing countryside, feature a confused mother as a narrator, and are vertiginous nouveau-roman reads. Schweblin has become a darling of contemporary literature. Harwicz so far has not. The differences between their texts perhaps explain why. Where Schweblin’s text has a measured, even orderly tone, Harwicz’s prose sits on sanity’s borderline. There’s a slightly surprising (and then unsurprising) reference to Mrs Dalloway thrown in there somewhere. Harwicz’s narrator’s voice is the bride stripped bare, the unedited stream of an unhinged consciousness. Except, for the fact, of course, that to write ‘unhinged’ prose in a legible fashion is a great art. Harwicz’s prose contains a poetic density. Constructed out of small chapters, no more than a few pages long, the novel creates space for the taboo to be voiced, for the madness within civilisation to be articulated.
Which is about as rational as you need to get. The fact of the matter is that this is a breathtaking little novel, which may not be to many people’s tastes, but is all the braver and more brilliant for being so. It’s a novel from the margin, the novel of an immigrant, the novel of a hyper-charged female psyche, but it’s also a novel which captures the inner voice of anyone and everyone, regardless of gender, with our subliminal Pinteresque cruelties and our unacknowledged Klimtian beauty.
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