Unfit

Harwicz (Die, My Love) spins an unrelenting tale of a migrant woman who takes drastic steps to fulfill her radical conception of motherly love. Lisa Trejman, an Argentinian living in rural France, desperately waits for updates regarding the custody case over her twin sons J and E, after her husband, Armand, reported her for domestic abuse. Alone and with no support system, she resorts to a rash and unthinkable course of action: setting fire to her parents-in-law's house in the middle of the night and kidnapping her children in the ensuing mayhem. As she's inundated with calls and messages from Armand during her "adventure" across France with the twins, as she calls it, the true toxic nature of the couple's relationship slowly comes into focus, as does the insidious xenophobic scheming of Armand's controlling parents. Eventually, Lisa decides to reveal their location to Armand, and the family is briefly reunited for a few chaotic but happy nights, before the couple's violent pattern inevitably rears its ugly head, leading to an explosive and haunting ending. Harwicz's assured pacing is bolstered by her gorgeous and often darkly funny prose, immaculately translated by Mendez Sayer: "Love," says Lisa, "is hundreds of aggressive monkeys looting and pillaging believers at the entrance to a Buddhist temple." The result is a wild and unforgettable ride. (Oct.)

A woman loses custody of her sons and her senses. Lisa Trejman's hard-won family has fractured. She is alone in France, far from her native Argentina, and without the costume of normalcy she once wore. Lisa eschews each societally approved step back to custody (how she lost it is only hinted at); she prowls outside her sons' school, harangues her lawyer, and arrives at a supervised visit bearing a chocolate bar and a knife in her purse. Lisa's motivation to reclaim her children is a mixture, of unknown proportions, of maternal love, power play, and vengeance. The father who now cares for them did not want children. Lisa is Jewish, and her husband's family made antisemitic complaints about the fact that their grandchildren would have Jewish heritage. Now, she watches from afar as the in-laws who insinuated that Jewish people "never wash their private parts" tend to her sons. That is, until Lisa sets her in-laws' farm on fire, grabs her sleeping sons, and runs. From then on, she's a fugitive, journeying across Europe with the confused boys unbuckled in the backseat. Lisa's narration skids from past to present in a haze of run-on sentences, forcing the reader to parse plot from paranoia. As she alienates herself from traditional human connection, she mocks it: "I pushed him into the river for love. I did what I did in the name of love. I molested her because I loved her too much." Underpinning her venomous musings is the thesis that there can be no love without violence--that love is a kind of violence. This is no thriller, as 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. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.