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.