The crime that opens Cristina Rivera Garza’s “Death Takes Me” is one of unusual violence, viscerally described with a poet’s compression: “A collection of impossible angles. A skin, the skin. … Ear. Foot. Sex. An open red thing. A context. A boiling point. Something undone.” In an unnamed city, a man has been murdered and castrated, his body left in an alley. The body is discovered by a professor named Cristina Rivera Garza, who is versed in the distinctions between literal and symbolic castration, and who also reports the crime to the police.
As more castrated bodies are discovered and fear spreads, Cristina becomes both witness and suspect. She also emerges as an unlikely source for the investigation, helping to interpret the mysterious messages left at each crime scene: fragmented lines of poetry, carefully written in coral nail polish, or lipstick, or cut-out letters from magazines and newspapers. “Beware of me, my love,” one reads, a message of both seduction and menace. As the killer evades the grasp of both Cristina and the police, the missives become more pervasive, changing form, at once taunting and tormented, philosophical and unhinged.
“Death Takes Me” was first published nearly 20 years ago in its original Spanish. Now it arrives in the United States, seamlessly translated into English by Sarah Booker and Robin Myers. For American readers, it follows the publication of a handful of acclaimed Rivera Garza titles, including the novel “The Iliac Crest” and the Pulitzer Prize-winning memoir “Liliana’s Invincible Summer.” Many of the themes and techniques in those books appear here: gendered violence, misogyny, the exploration of both the possibilities and restrictions of language.
“Death Takes Me” immediately establishes this nexus of ideas. The victims are men, the murders explicitly and vividly physical. But in describing the attacks, language itself performs its own secondary mutilation. As Cristina says, “La víctima is always feminine. Do you see? … This word will castrate them over and over again.”
Always present in Rivera Garza’s body of work is an interest in close interpretation — often, the interpretation of texts, be they poems, journal entries, letters or newspaper articles. In “Liliana’s Invincible Summer,” Rivera Garza herself guides the reader through the eponymous Liliana’s journals and via interviews with her friends, as she painstakingly pieces together a portrait of her murdered sister.
“Death Takes Me” riffs on these same ideas and motifs. We again have a Cristina Rivera Garza, working to interpret a text in the high-stakes arena of life and death — only this time she is a fictional narrator, and the story is a detective story instead of a somber personal reckoning.
But this detective novel radically scrambles what we think of, and how we relate to, the genre. The book features some of the standard fare of the mystery: There are bodies and clues, suspects and investigations, a pungent sense of fear and unease. And there are playful nods to familiar archetypes (the tabloid journalist is named “the Tabloid Journalist”; the detective is “the Detective,” a recurring character throughout Rivera Garza’s work). But the path toward apprehending the culprit runs not through a procedural hunt but via an unlikely act of literary criticism.
The missives the killer leaves at the scene of each crime are revealed to be lines lifted from the poetry of the great Argentine writer Alejandra Pizarnik. These clues are what initially compel the Detective to contact Cristina; she recognizes the case to be “full of psychological nooks and crannies. Of poetic shadows. Gender traps. Metaphors. Metonyms.”
That also describes Rivera Garza’s exceptional style, and the deeply rewarding experience of reading “Death Takes Me.” The novel is dense and elliptical, a dreamscape with a powerful undertow. Texts proliferate throughout it: the Pizarnik quotations, an academic paper titled “The Longing for Prose,” a collection of poetry. Perhaps most pertinent is a series of intensely personal, confessional but unsigned messages sent to Cristina. Their writer proffers a clutch of rapidly shifting monikers: from Joachima Abramović to Gina Pane to Lynn Hershman. Identifying the author of those texts, fixing the name attached to the messages, appears to go hand in hand with identifying the killer.
Rivera Garza once described writing as “greeting herself as another for the first time.” It is “the opposite of knowing oneself,” she continued. “Unknowing, that would be an appropriate term to describe … what I thought writing was for.” Perhaps unsurprisingly, Rivera Garza does not follow the conventions of the mystery narrative, the narrowing of a multitude of names to one. Instead, the novel growing increasingly expansive as the strictures around identity grow looser and looser, encompassing more and more.
In this harrowing and labyrinthine masterpiece, Rivera Garza ultimately goes one step further, unsettlingly implicating readers themselves. Every mystery puts the reader in the position of the detective — reading for clues, guessing at possible solutions — but in “Death Takes Me,” Rivera Garza does more than make this parallel literal. The novel argues that reading isn’t just detective work or a form of interrogation; it’s deadly, in and of itself. Reader, writer, killer vividly collide. As the novel’s anonymous message writer says, “Those who analyze, murder. I’m sure you knew that, Professor. Those who read carefully, dismember. We all kill.”
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