Argentine writer Ariana Harwicz's Unfit seems spare at just over 100 pages but immediately reveals itself as an immersive fever dream. Tight typography and minimal kerning densely pack every page, a single paragraph often covers multiple pages, and sentences jump temporally and narratively without warning. Harwicz masterfully presents controlled chaos, capturing the intense desperation of a mother separated from her young children.
Lisa, the narrator, laments she can only see her twin sons "once a month in a supervised place, getting even less than terrorists' families." She's allowed "an hour and a half to be a mother." She's been "accused of maladaptive behavior, intimidation, and subjecting [her] spouse to harassment," with 150 letters supporting the allegations against her. That she's an Argentine migrant to France provides her powerful in-laws convenient reason to damn her. When the relentless separation becomes unbearable, Lisa sets her in-laws' farmyard ablaze, creating an opportunity to grab J and E from the house: "I came to rescue you and take you on an adventure," she convinces them. "I arrived in the middle of the night to save you from the terrible smoke.... I arrived just in time." And now they're on the run, without plans or resources.
Harwicz (Die, My Love) unblinkingly examines love and motherhood through the lens of a woman pushed over the brink by frenzied desolation. Lisa is a foreigner, an outcast, a discarded parent legally deemed unnecessary. In her harrowing situation, she has little else left to lose in attempting to reclaim the vastness of what she's lost. --Terry Hong