I wanted to like this, but although I persevered to the end, it was a quick skim-read for at least the last half. Stylised, obscure to the point of 'I really don't get it'. I was disappointed, so let's move on....

(With thanks to the publisher and NetGalley for an ARC of this title.)

Death Takes Me, the latest novel by Cristina Rivera Garza to be translated into English, starts with a sort of epigraph titled “The Castrated Men.” The epigraph is a quote by Slovene philosopher and sociologist Renata Salecl: “However, with humans, castration should not be understood as the basis for denying the possibility of the sexual relationship, but as the prerequisite for any sexual relation at all. It can even be said that it is only because subjects are castrated that human relations as such can exist.”

The novel thus immediately establishes its premise, both in terms of tone and theme, but also hints at Rivera Garza’s fragmentary and intertextual writing style. By quoting Salecl, who was inspired by Lacanian theory on castration not as a physical mutilation but as a limitation on language, culture, and social norms, she throws the reader right into the middle of the type of discourse on gender dynamics with which Death Takes Me will attempt to engage.

As the novel begins in earnest, we find Professor Cristina Rivera Garza—the main character as well as the name of the author herself—on a run through the alleys of an unknown city when she comes across the body of a young man. The man has been mutilated, his penis cut off, laying in “a collection of impossible angles.” Accompanying the body are four lines of poetry, written in a red lipstick, from “Árbol De Diana” by Alejandra Pizarnik, a legendary Argentinian poet active in the 50s and 60s:

beware of me, my love
beware of the silent woman in the desert
of the traveler with an emptied glass
and of her shadow’s shadow

After reporting the crime to the police, Cristina, herself an expert in Pizarnik’s poetry, becomes entangled with The Detective, the woman assigned to investigate the case, both as an accomplice and a suspect.

More murders, all of men, all of whom have been castrated, and all involving Pizarnik’s poetry, unsettle the city as the novel progresses, and what follows is a genre-bending novel that intertwines elements of crime fiction, metafiction, and linguistic discourse. This is a premise in line with Rivera Garza’s larger oeuvre, which has been described as one full of “disturbing pleasure,” exploring gender violence, misogyny, and the limits of human language. While nodding to the classic structure of the detective novel, Death Takes Me inverts its gendered tropes: its two male characters, Valerio, The Detective’s assistant, and Cristina’s “Lover with the Luminous Smile,” are placed in roles typically assigned to the genre’s female characters. Instead of rational and scientific, they are portrayed as sensual and intuitive, and are never fully fleshed out. Post-coitus with an unspecified lover, Cristina wonders:

[W]hy isn’t he afraid? In the time that precedes pleasure and the time following it, the man hasn’t felt any fear. He’s in an unknown house, in an unknown bed, in an unknown body, and not for a second, not for even the tiniest sliver of that second, has he let himself be interrupted by fear. Or doubt. Or suspicion.

In its central crime, the novel offers an implicit nod to (and inversion of) the wave of feminicides in the city of Juárez. By modelling the narrator after herself, Rivera Garza is pointing a sharp finger to the literary and academic establishment for its role in perpetuating the linguistic and actual gendered violence in Mexico. But with the juxtaposition of the effort to solve this string of crimes and the text’s formal commitment to obscuring meaning, Death Takes Me raises the question: is it possible to write a novel that seeks to have a clear political message while also arguing against the desire to look for answers in literature?

First published in 2008 in its original Spanish, Death Takes Me, translated into English by Sarah Booker and Robin Myers, can be categorized as part of a larger wave of antagonistic literature—or antinovelas—seeking to disrupt expectations and create an uneasy relationship between the reader and the text, like Rachel Cusk’s Outline, which, though experimental in style, actively and constantly invites the reader to interpret the themes of the text and go beyond what is on the page. Death Takes Me, on the other hand, seems to categorically oppose the act of interpretation. Its many layers of reality, narration, and intertextuality conspire to hinder the reader from reaching any real conclusions. Interpretation is also explicitly likened to murder throughout the novel.

The crimes at the heart of the story—the dismemberment of the young men—problematize the physical and metaphysical realities of masculinity. Rivera Garza, as author and narrator, is intrigued by castration as a concept both in the literal and symbolic sense. The castration of these men is manifold: first and most obviously, they have had their genitals cut off. But the men have also been castrated in a more ontologically threatening way by being placed in the position of the female: la víctima, constantly revictimized through the reporting of their death. Rivera Garza frequently references the Chapman brothers’ sculpture Great Deeds Against the Dead, which depicts two castrated and dismembered men—the sculpture itself references Plate 39 from Goya’s The Disasters of War—and for Rivera Garza, it seems to serve as commentary on repeated spectatorship as repeated victimization. These men constantly suffer castration under the gaze of the reader. As the newspapers struggle with how to report on this unprecedented wave of androcide plaguing the city, we are faced with the stark fact that, in Spanish, the word for victim is always feminine. “No one, however, would find a suitable grammatical way to masculinize the victim,” Rivera Garza writes, “which was surely why—although it was surely for many other reasons, too—the newspaper would call it the case of the Castrated Men.”

This grammatical conundrum is, however, one that does not entirely translate into English, a language which doesn’t gender nouns like Spanish does. And with a focus on the theoretical framework of language and the episteme, the whole novel quickly becomes shrouded in a cloud of incomprehension. There’s a dizzying quality to the text; it is never quite clear, from one chapter to the other, or one sentence to the other, who is speaking, and the writing is choppy, jumbled—not-quite-stream-of-consciousness, not quite poetry. Cristina’s narration becomes increasingly unreliable as her personality begins to splinter and she takes on different personae. As a reader, we are made to question whether she could truly be the murderess: if she is capable of such gruesome acts. This sense of split personality drags the reader with it in a descent into madness. Anticipating her readers’ concerns and quoting Pizarnik, whose presence haunts the novel, Rivera Garza asks and answers, “Is clarity a virtue? I know no virtues. I only know desires.”

Similarly, reflecting on Pizarnik’s “journey towards prose,” Rivera Garza notes that Pizarnik was constantly “impeded by her own way of writing.” She quotes from Pizarnik’s diary:

My lack of rhythm when I write. Disjointed phrases. Impossibility of forming sentences, of conserving the traditional grammatical structure. I’m missing the subject. Then I’m missing the verb. What’s left is a mutilated predicate, tattered attributes I don’t know who or what to give them to. This is due to a lack of meaning in my internal elements. No. It’s more like a problem of attention. And, above all, a sort of castration of the ear: I cannot perceive the melody of a sentence.

This passage taunts the reader as Rivera Garza, the narrator, notes that Pizarnik’s issues can be summarized as 1) a lack of subject, and 2) a certain distance from reality, both of which also serve as a meta critique of the writing in Death Takes Me. It’s clear that Rivera Garza, the author, is aware of the impenetrable quality of her own writing. She’s doing it on purpose.

It is also clear that Rivera Garza wants the reader to let go of the impulse to interpret in order to soak in the feeling of the novel: obsession, madness, and violence. Towards the end of the novel, she muses on poetry and sets up an explicit opposition between the externality of prose and the internality of poetry (“THOSE WHO VERSIFY DON’T VERIFY”). Indeed, Rivera Garza seems to pose the very act of trying to bring clarity or meaning to a work of literature as an act of violence, likened to the decisive act of killing. Cristina receives a string of letters from someone first calling herself Joachima Abramövich, then later taking on the identity of real-life artists Gina Pane and Lynn Hershman Leeson—all of whom may or may not be the split personalities of the narrator herself and which act as conceptual and historical echoes of the novel’s project. The letter-writer insists: “Those who analyze, murder. I’m sure you knew that, Professor. Those who read carefully, dismember. We all kill.”

The Detective, in trying to uncover the truth of the murders and bring clarity to the case, is killing the poetic intention of the perpetrator (Cristina herself?) just as the reader is doing to the author by trying to find meaning. Rivera Garza quotes the philosopher Hélène Cixous, “All great texts are victims of the questions: Who is killing me? To whom am I giving myself over to be killed?” The act of interpretation is always also the death of the original meaning or the intention of the author, Rivera Garza seems to be saying.

Ultimately, however, the failure of The Detective to solve the case of the Castrated Men and catch the perpetrator comes to figure as a metaphor for and an indictment against society’s larger failure to re-imagine a world where women are not always the victims and where gender is not the governing structure of language.

Formally, then, Rivera Garza insists that interpretation kills art and she opposes the search for meaning in literature. Yet on the level of plot, the search for meaning is represented in the effort to solve the crimes at heart of the novel, and the failure to do so represents a political failure to come closer to understanding and solving the issues of misogyny. On one level, Rivera Garza celebrates the failure to find meaning; on the other, she condemns it. In the end, the overwhelming feeling that thus washes over the reader is one of confusion and disorientation. This takes the power away from the truly interesting questions she is trying to pose about gender, the place of poetry, and the (potentially violent) act of interpretation — questions she answers much more eloquently and efficiently in other work. As form and content fail to align, the novel suffers from the impossible task it has set itself, attempting to resist clarity while also delivering a clear political or linguistic message.

Thanks to the publisher and Netgalley for my free digital ARC!

This book is rather confusing, sometimes brilliant, sometimes dull, always quite interesting but never quite grabbing my attention fully… It’s playful if a book about murdered and castrated men can be said to be playful. After reading Reservoir Bitches earlier in the week, and given the frequency of violence against women depicted in Mexican fiction, it was an interesting twist to have men be the subject of the violence for once.

The main character has the same name as the author, a professor assisting a detective in a serial killer case, where men are targeted and mutilated. Mysterious lines of poetry by an Argentine poet are left at the scene of the crime. About 100 pages in, we get a weird, kinda boring little departure into an academic text about said poet. More meta departures follow, leaving the murder behind to venture into experimental, Inception-esque poetry and prose.

I’m not sure I fully grasped what was being put out there, and that’s on me.

One of Mexico’s best voices in feminist lit currently; a by no means easy feat given the amount of translations we are lucky enough to be getting in English currently. Reading this was a really good supplement to Garza’s nonfiction too

I can confidently say that I don't entirely know what I just read. Surreal, meta and exploratory, reminded me a little of Clarice Lispector and Robert Bolano. I really enjoyed the experience of reading this, it feels like something that needs digestion and at least one additional read through. Won't be everyone's cup of tea, but if you're interested in something kind of challenging I would recommend it!

Having really enjoyed ‘The Iliac Crest’ by Cristina Rivera Garza, I was so excited to request this newly translated book from the same author. Unfortunately, this one wasn’t for me.

I had a really hard time getting into the novel and following what was happening. I found myself confused for most of the reading experience. Beyond the main plot, a large portion of the commentary felt somewhat irrelevant to the core story. Sadly, between the highly literary and experimental style and my lack of engagement, I decided to DNF at around 35–40%.

Thanks to the publisher and NetGalley for the e-ARC. All opinions are my own.

<i><blockquote>Didn't she have, as the expert in serial killers had put it, an unhealthy interest in looking inside? Wouldn't that interest suffice to open the wound? And wasn't that, at the end of the day, what writing is?</i></blockquote>

This is another startling, demanding and exciting piece of writing from CRG. Don't be too wedded to the dark thriller label I've seen attributed to this book in the media - while this is dark and, yes, thrilling, that exhilaration comes from the intellectual stretch that the narrative is making between a series of murders that involve castrated men and practices of reading and writing. Connections are - as in poetry which is one of the foundations upon which this narrative is built - suggestive, loose, emblematic, metaphorical and emotive rather than hard (interesting word in this context), neat and pinned down.

Ideas and images abound which spiral off in all kinds of intellectual and figurative directions: castration connects gender, violence, 'manliness' and the penis to systems of psychological thought from Freud, Lacan and [author:Luce Irigaray|7804], [author:Hélène Cixous|88674] and also have a place in literary theory especially in thinking about textual representations of authority, dominance and vulnerability. The murders, more literally, invert the global epidemic of femicide and allow a fantasy of male fear of being outside and suspicion of women, with the investigation overseen by a female detective (is this the same Detective who appears in some of CRG's short fiction?)

At the heart of the book is a multilayered investigation of textuality: at each murder site a line of poetry by [author:Alejandra Pizarnik|112534] is inscribed in 'female'-coded material: coral nail polish, lipstick - while the professor who stumbles over the first body, 'Christina Rivera Garza', is writing a treatise on Pizarnik which makes up a central section of the book we are reading. Other texts also have a presence, including a manuscript of a book called 'Death Takes Me'.

In some ways - and this is where my interest really sparked - this novel is also a treatise on poetry and an act of literary criticism and scholarly argumentation. I was especially thrilled to see CRG grappling with something that I am also currently thinking about: the issue of textual fragmentation in verse, positioned here as a kind of spacial castration at the heart of the poetic line which also affects its aural quality: 'a sort of castration of the ear: I cannot perceive the melody of the sentence'. Just as the masculine bodies have been cut, 'Pizarnikian prose frequently snips the threads of meaning in language by using fragmented lines or paragraphs' - and, of course, the metatext we are reading does the same thing, especially through the use of parentheses to 'cut' the usually more straightforward connection between prose structure and meaning.

This point is developed through mentions of [author:Emily Dickinson|7440]'s abandonment of conventional punctuation which renders her poetry free of authoritative grammatical structures and artists such as [author:Marina Abramović|16793] whose performance art aims to disturb viewers but who also deliberates alienates language from meaning.

At one level the investigation of the murders is paralleled with textual investigations but there is no simple one to one relationship in this multivocal text. Would I recommend this? Well, if you're looking for a noir-ish thriller then I expect this might prove frustrating. But as a postmodern thriller with intellectual roots and a probing, literary intelligence I found this stimulating and exhilarating.

This new novel by Cristina Rivera Garza, one of Mexico's greatest authors, defies genres once again. It explores gender politics and Latin American art and literature while having the appearance of a postmodern thriller. Death Takes Me is a wonderful addition to an already impressive body of work, told with an amazing energy and kinetic style.

Death Takes Me is another book to chalk up to it’s not you it’s me. I just didn’t vibe, that’s all, so this review will be pretty short. Ultimately — and I can’t help but phrase this rudely — it just read like pretentious wank. Yes, by the end, everything tied together, but it was tedious and self-congratulating and, when the book of poems showed up at the end to reveal the killer, I just had to roll my eyes. Also, way too many people who didn’t get names, who then became referred to just by pronouns and there were points when I just gave up keeping track.

This was like a poetic puzzle. A professor turned detective as the main character was fresh, and the writing was curious.
3.5 stars.
I will need to come back to this because although the formatting makes it more condensed of a read than the actual page number, I might have missed some of the metaphors.

Cristina Rivera Garza’s prize-winning, metafictional novel is dense and deliberately demanding, requiring the reader to actively mine her text to extract meaning. On the surface it’s a noir-ish, detective novel revolving around a series of brutal murders. Hidden corners of a Mexican city conceal the corpses of castrated men. The first body is found by a woman out running. The woman, whose name is Cristina Rivera Garza, is an academic who’s struck by the scene as bloody spectacle. To her it resembles a macabre artwork, bringing to mind a Chapman Brothers’ piece inspired by Goya’s explorations of death and war. This response is reinforced by the presence of lines taken from Argentine poet Alejandra Pizarnik – her poetry will be found at every subsequent murder site. The fictional Rivera Garza’s discovery transforms her into the Informant interrogated by the Detective, a woman assigned to oversee the investigation. It will bring her into contact too with Valerio the Detective’s male assistant. And, later, they will all encounter the shadowy Tabloid Journalist, who’s apparently researching Pizarnik.

But Rivera Garza’s crime narrative departs from expected formulas in which a dogged detective hunts down clues to get to the truth of the matter. In Rivera Garza’s scenario truth is elusive, justice always deferred, in keeping with a society – and a world - in which femicides like those in Juárez routinely go unsolved, so commonplace as to be considered unremarkable. Instead, the Detective, whose naming is fixed by their role in the social order, becomes obsessed with Pizarnik’s elliptical poetry, with what it might mean. A move that opens up questions around processes of writing and reading and the resistance of certain forms to interpretation. This, in turn, sets off an ongoing dialogue with Pizarnik’s writings that becomes increasingly central.

As this unconventional novel unfolds, Rivera Garza continues to subvert expectations, inserting extensive musings on Pizarnik, conflicting readings of her life, her work, her legacy overshadowed by her early death by suicide. Narrative flow becomes fractured and fragmented like the bodies of the murdered men, restlessly shifting between narrators and genres. One section consists of messages that may, or may not, be from the murderer/s. Each note is signed with the name of a different performance artist, from Abramović to Gina Pane, underlining the Informant’s initial impression of the crime scene as spectacle. This focus on women artists engaged in exposing voyeurism and defamiliarizing gendered violence signals another of Rivera Garza’s major preoccupations here. Rivera Garza deploys aspects of Lacanian psychoanalytic thought, as reformulated by Renata Salecl, so that on one level, the castrated men signify symbolic castration, questions of desire and lack. But in her broader narrative, the serial slaughter unsettles the city’s male population, many believe the murderer’s female and begin to live in fear of women. A state of affairs that parallels women’s everyday experience, calling into question complacency surrounding violence against women.

Rivera Garza’s text includes an essay by her fictional counterpart probing Pizarnik’s troubled relationship with prose. And, later, she inserts a collection of poems indirectly commenting on the case of the castrated men, the style and content heavily indebted to Pizarnik - apparently penned by someone called Anne-Marie Bianco its true origins are hazy at best. It’s accompanied by the publisher’s reflections on its discovery. All part of a wider, elaborate conceit, in real life these poems were published separately by Rivera Garza under the Bianco pseudonym. This play on authorship and the boundaries between texts is fundamental to Rivera Garza’s approach to writing – the Detective reappears in The Taiga Syndrome which operates in similar ways, as well as in numerous short stories. Intertextuality is key here from Pizarnik to Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels. Rivera Garza uses Swift to introduce a fantastical element, an oblique reflection on the absurdity underpinning the so-called justice system. But it also furthers Rivera Garza’s ongoing interrogation of writing as a practice; her rejection of popular myths of writing as original act of creation, and of the author as a solitary figure inspired by mysterious forces. Rivera Garza’s enigmatic novel’s difficult to summarize: dry stretches are punctuated by bursts of unexpected comedy, realism gives way to bizarre but hypnotic flights of fancy, the abstract jostles with the concrete. But I found it consistently intriguing, multi-layered, intricate and provocative. Translated by Sarah Booker and Robin Myers.