Starred review from November 18, 2024
A poetry-obsessed serial killer mutilates men in this unforgettable literary puzzle from Rivera Garza, who won the Pulitzer for her memoir, Liliana’s Invincible Summer. After a Mexican literature professor named Cristina Rivera Garza stumbles upon a castrated dead man while out jogging one night in her unnamed city, a police officer referred to only as the Detective investigates. Three more victims are found around the city—all with their genitals cut off. In each case, the killer leaves behind cryptic lines from the Argentine poet Alejandra Pizarnik, who died by suicide in 1972. The Detective and her assistant, Valerio, interview relatives of the victims and enlist Cristina’s help in decoding Pizarnik’s dark, fragmented poetry (“It’s true, death takes me in the throes of sex”). Meanwhile, a reporter referred to as the Tabloid Journalist investigates the crimes on her own, and the plot thickens when the killer sends Cristina enigmatic letters written in Pizarnik’s voice. Told in 97 brief chapters, the novel brilliantly melds the grit and pacing of a police procedural with literary theory, interweaving the investigation, Cristina’s scholarship on Pizarnik, the killer’s letters to Cristina, and a poetry manuscript by the killer entitled “Death Takes Me.” It’s all seamlessly conveyed in Rivera Garza’s incisive and poetic style. Life and literature become one in this singular achievement. Agent: Jacqueline Ko, Wylie Agency.
January 1, 2025
Translators Booker and Myers do a commendable job bringing this complicated literary novel, an early work by Pulitzer Prize-winning Rivera Garza (Liliana's Invincible Summer, 2023), to English readers. Ostensibly a murder mystery, it embarks down the dark path of a serial murderer in Mexico City. A professor named, curiously, Cristina Rivera Garza discovers a man's castrated corpse on a lonely street during her morning run. What follows are 97 short chapters that land like punches as they deliver a litany of grotesque, graphic details of blood, mutilations, death, and autopsies. This assassin seems to want to be found, leaving verses from poems on each corpse, committing the murders on the same deserted dead-end streets. The point of view veers among the jaded female detective in charge of the investigation, her young male assistant, the professor, and a tabloid journalist. Rivera Garza's nonlinear novel of violence and literature, written in elegiac, incandescent prose, reverses the horror of the victims of femicide along the U.S.-Mexico border with taunting murders of men in the city, a pointed turnabout.
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January 15, 2025
A professor and a detective become obsessed with a killer. "That's a body." That's the reaction of professor Cristina Rivera Garza--the main character of this novel, who shares her name with its author--when she discovers the corpse of a man while on one of her customary runs. The man is missing his penis, the victim of a mutilation; "a terrible thing against the dead," Cristina says, referencing "Great Deeds Against the Dead," a sculpture by Jake and Dinos Chapman, itself based on an etching by Francisco Goya. Cristina reports the body to the police, and the case is assigned to an officer, "the Detective," who is interested in a clue left at the scene of the crime: four lines from a poem by Argentine literary legend Alejandra Pizarnik. Over the following days, three more bodies are found, all with their genitals removed. As the Detective works to solve the case, Cristina receives a series of cryptic messages from the murderer, who tells her, "You shouldn't be afraid of me. I won't hurt you. I couldn't possibly hurt you." There's also the Detective's assistant, Valerio, and a tabloid journalist, both of whom are fascinated with the case. Much of the novel is given to various philosophical musings on gender and art, and the text is interspersed with occasional verse. It's a fairly audacious literary experiment with shades of Roberto Bola�o, but it never really comes together--the narrative trickery is frustrating, and while Rivera Garza is clearly a more than talented author, the effect is ponderous. For a novel with a blood-soaked premise, this one is oddly bloodless. A rare miss from an author with an impeccable bibliography.
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