New York: New Directions, 2026. 144 pages.
Argentine writer Malén Denis’s debut novella, Lithium, begins, “You were breathing fire when I met you, I should have sensed the danger: a pale, shirtless sixteen-year-old in the middle of a frozen field inhaling slugs of kerosene and spewing jets of flame out into the night.” “You,” the protagonist’s ex-boyfriend, is solid: exposed muscle streaked with oil. The protagonist’s “I” is a hazy double exposure of present and past. She flickers around him, fire as passion and pain.
Their break-up does not appear to be a typical one. The ex-lovers, whom Denis leaves unnamed throughout the work, are still texting, but remain isolated. While the ex-boyfriend is in a psychiatric hospital, our protagonist is apartment- and cat-sitting for him. His more recent ex-girlfriend, Violeta, has been cryptically “contained.” The question of what transpired to separate them hovers unanswered in the margins. Her friends disapprove of him, and she changes the subject. Her silence is perturbing, a pit in the text’s stomach.
Denis is a poet, and her novella is suffused with a highly sensorial, instinctive prose style. The imagery is textural and chemical. Like lithium, the narrator is highly reactive: on guard for potential threats, impulsive, and sensitive to atmospheric changes. She fluctuates between bouts of self-recrimination, despair for her future, and depersonalization. “I feel like I’ve been dyed, though the contours and fiber are still me,” she says in one instance. Her ex’s hands are “rough,” textured, while he sees hers as overly soft, “papery.” Without his hardened, opinionated character constricting her, she is unbounded and risks dissolution.
Denis’ prose reads like a porous membrane between the narrator’s interiority, her clouded mind, and her physical reality. Emotions remain obscure; instead, she narrates her misadventures in housekeeping, often addressed to “you.” Her tone is one of arresting bluntness, even humor. While being attacked by the cat, she deadpans, “The idea that they could have found me dead in my underwear on your living room floor flashes sensationalistic headlines through my mind: Girl with no Job or Future Bleeds to Death in House of Psychotic Ex Following Mysterious Incident with Hyper-Maternal Cat.”
“Like lithium, the narrator is highly reactive: on guard for potential threats, impulsive, and sensitive to atmospheric changes.”
Days accumulate. She records her solitary lethargy, her vigorous bouts of cooking and cleaning, her abandoned plans. Memories reemerge unassimilated. It occurs to her that her suicidal mother lit candles in their home before bed, nearly killing them both. Solid ground continues to evade her. “At seven o’clock in the morning, the world is absolutely luminous, objects have clear boundaries, everything is perfectly defined against its background,” she narrates. “And then everything falls apart the moment the light begins to disperse… everything ends up conveying the sense of an irrecoverable loss.”
Still, the liminality of the apartment offers her an alternative to forced socializing or a coherence she cannot convincingly display. Her mind is unwieldy, fluid. As psychoanalysts would have it, she is undergoing an “unintegration” that perhaps precedes a more authentic reintegration. Unintegration is not the abyss, the “irrecoverable loss,” of total psychic disintegration. She is simply, to quote analyst D.W. Winnicott, “going on being.” The story could be read as a testament to the quiet heroism therein. Out of this emptied state, memories of her ex-partner’s abuse surface. In the crevices of his apartment, in the corners of her mind: “Another blood stain, this time while cleaning places I’m sure you didn’t even realize existed. They exist. What did you do?”
Denis’s work emerges within a prolific tradition of Argentinian feminist writers, from Victoria Ocampo’s prison letters during the Perón dictatorship in the 1950s to the “Not One Less” movement against femicide, now on the rise again under Argentina’s far-right president, Javier Milei. Recent works address femicide and abuse directly. Selva Almada’s nonfiction work Dead Girls (2020) offers a journalistic account of two women’s murders. In Dolores Reyes’ Cometierra (2019), a woman develops the power to see disappeared women upon eating soil. Whereas these works offer allegorical or fact-based portrayals of abuse, Denis paints a delicate mental picture of everyday paranoias and suppressed agonies. She portrays partner violence as highly intimate and indeterminate. Her atypical project examines the mind of a victim who cares for her abuser and resists the reality of her abuse.
The book is chiefly propelled by her mental prevarications as she attempts to regain subjectivity beyond toxic attachment. By dwelling in the aftermath of domestic violence, Denis attunes her readers to the silent isolation of recovery. Still, the silence permits the narrator to hold on to unplumbed psychic depths until she has the capacity to confront the unspoken. As those around her confirm her realizations, the ground steadies. She builds authentic relationships and finds renewed self-direction. Denis denies her character facile wholeness or a shiny finality. Instead, the protagonist regains stability without losing her youthful slipperiness of selfhood, a humanistic multiplicity beyond superficial constraint.
