Heart of Damage

“A masterful work”—Carlos Pardo, Babelia

“I would give the Cervantes Prize to María Negroni”—Cristina Rivera Garza

“And if her writing seems to tremble at times it is not because it is cowering, intimidated by the size of the task, but because it is naked.”—Patricio Pron, Culturas

“An intimate and extraordinary novel in which she explores the ambiguous relationship between life and writing.“—Silvina Friera, Página 12

“Like Marguerite Duras throughout her work, like Vuong, Negroni explores the figure of her mother. She does so through sentences that function as very short paragraphs—each sentence a paragraph—veritable lashes of language.”—Carolina Esses, La Nación

“Forcefulness, musical rage, isolation that illuminates, language that overflows the boundary between prose and poetry, rhythm. Heart of Damage is almost a literary testimony, self-fiction sewn with the thread of literature, and above all the long and intricate journey of a writer’s training.”—Mario Nosotti, Revista Ñ

“This novel is at once a testimony, an essay, a philosophical thought. It is also a profound reflection on childhood, the ultimate meaning of existence and the strangeness of life (…) Negroni’s writing is constructed on the basis of precious miniatures and becomes immense.”—Verónica Abdala, Clarín

“Heart of Damage is a requiem and a hallelujah, a song in which what is important is almost nameless because everything is flesh.”—Esther Peñas

“The mother-daughter relationship leads me to María Negroni’s extraordinary Heart of Damage, where a dazzling text puts a daughter in dialogue with her all-powerful mother. It is a deaf dialogue but sufficiently provocative for the daughter, who recognises the mother as the owner of language, to found a language of her own and become a writer.”—Paula Pérez Alonso, Página 12