Bluesky

At the beginning of Cristina Rivera Garza’s Death Takes Me, a literature professor encounters the body of a castrated man in an alleyway while out on a jog. The professor, who shares her name with the book’s author, calls the police to report the murder and thinks that this will be the end of her involvement. Instead, the case’s principal investigator, referred to only as “the Detective,” asks to see her. At the precinct, the Detective hands “the Professor” a photo of the brick wall from the alley where she discovered the body. We are given no other information about the castrated man, but we do know that the killer is a close reader of contemporary poetry: Scrawled on the wall in red nail polish are well-known lines from El Arbol de Diana, by the Argentinian writer Alejandra Pizarnik, a collection of short poems about absence, loss, and recognition. Later, we learn that lines from Pizarnik’s poems have been found near the bodies of other murdered men all around the city, the verses smeared on walls or on the ground or contained in letters found nearby, which take the form of the classic serial-killer calling card of words collaged from newspaper and magazine clippings.

These encounters with Pizarnik’s poetry suddenly transform what otherwise appears as the Professor’s useless skill—literary analysis—into an essential tool to solve the crimes, at least according to the Detective. “We’re in the presence of an aesthete,” the Detective says about the murderer. “An obsessive aesthete who wants to send us a message about the body, the male body, and the letters of the alphabet.” Suddenly, the killer’s literary ambitions are made clearer when the Professor begins to receive notes slipped under her door. Erotic, terrorizing, and confusing, the 12 messages are addressed to the Professor and signed by different performance artists—Gina Pane, Joachima Abramović, Lynn Hershman. Reading and interpretation thus quickly become a problem with more dire stakes: What to read? How to read? And to what ends—justice, closure, pleasure, or something else? This murder mystery, braided with questions of art and creation, is Rivera Garza’s attempt to understand the thorny ethics of spectatorship through the unlikely figure of the reader.

One of the most prolific Mexican writers of her generation, Rivera Garza has won the highest literary awards offered to English- and Spanish-language writers (a MacArthur, a Pulitzer, a Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz Prize, and others). Working across multiple languages, registers, and genres—critical essays, poems, translations, novels, and memoirs—she often returns to similar concerns: the fraught quality of language, the various histories of violence, and the role that narrative and representation play in addressing them. Rivera Garza has mined the violence of language in The Iliac Crest, played with disappearance and translation in The Taiga Syndrome, and grappled with the enduring widespread violence in Mexico in Grieving: Dispatches From a Wounded Country. Across her oeuvre, she has explored what she calls the “grammar of violence” and the ways that representation either reinforces or rejects such images. And as a response to some of the more gratuitous and vacuous images of violence, she has proposed that we engage in the collective process of “necrowriting” to address this glut of death and horror, and has also called grieving a “politically active position.” Rivera Garza worked through her own loss in her memoir Liliana’s Invincible Summer, which traces with exquisite care her sister’s sudden death at the hands of a lover.

Artfully translated from the 2007 La Muerte Me Da by Robin Meyers and Sarah Booker, longtime collaborators of Rivera Garza’s, Death Takes Me is preoccupied, like much of her work, with the specter of violence and murder in Mexican life. It was written before the country’s deadly War on Drugs truly gained steam, an offensive launched by then-President Félipe Calderon in 2006, which led to historic levels of violence, and in particular violence against women. Rivera Garza has called the years since 2006 a “war against the Mexican people.” Death Takes Me showcases Rivera Garza’s range as a writer, using the fantastical, the noir novel, literary criticism, and poetry to explore, in part, what it means for both the author and the reader to engage with representations of violence—although to form any neat conclusions about Death Takes Me is to delimit this challenging and bewitching novel.

With Death Takes Me, it seems Rivera Garza was attuned, almost to a prescient degree, to the ways in which femicido would become a narrative trope in Mexican letters. In the novel, where one would normally find the mutilated bodies of young women, the reader finds instead a litany of murdered men who have been left castrated. In “Message No. 5,” the killer writes: “Their bodies are also destroyed in my dreams. I dream their penises are found—erect, invariable, cold, in glass jars that once contained preserves.” And in place of a police detective’s search for clues that slowly accumulate to generate answers, one finds a team of female readers deciphering a serial killer’s traces left in lipstick and nail polish to make some sense of these senseless acts. Elsewhere, Rivera Garza has demonstrated a sincere belief in literature and art to offer a worthy contribution to the traumas of violence that animate her oeuvre, but this absurd portrait of how we might aesthetically engage with the brutal realities of murder is perhaps a demonstration of a writer’s limit to effect change.

While Rivera Garza’s aim may be to disturb her readers and defamiliarize them with scenes of horror, using the male body to draw attention to the ubiquity of the violated female object of desire, the text is animated by the uncomfortable intimacy it generates (between the murderer and the Professor, between reader and author)—one brought to bear via the act of reading itself. Rivera Garza masterfully renders the abjectness and horror of violence in Death Takes Me by mirroring its illogical open-endedness; the murders are never solved. And instead of an investigation that slowly unfolds, we are given an almost obsessive attention to the literary traces that the killer leaves behind. The letters from her offer no answers, but they are charged with a desire that energizes the Professor and tricks the reader to wade deeper into a mystery that won’t be solved. “Message No. 8” reads:

   And if this isn’t sex, then what is?   And if this isn’t death, then what is?    I called myself Lynn Hershman. But everything dies,     Remember?Everything   tires.    Ay, Lynn, how I loved you. A photo. Another photo. The last     one. Fin.

As the Professor lies in bed wrapped around her lover, she explains how she received the Pizarnik poems that were left at the scene of the crimes. Yet she directs her inner monologue to the killer (or perhaps the reader?): “Three little poems. Three tiny messages. Then I thought of you, certainly.” Soon after, she writes: “And then I saw you; I did it again. So difficult sometimes to believe that, seeing you.”

This “you,” which points in multiple directions, reappears throughout the text, voiced by different characters—the Detective, the Professor, the murderer—though it mostly comes from what we assume to be the voice of the latter, which often interrupts the voice of the narrator. But are these two different voices? In one note, the murderer says: “Don’t you understand that I’m writing just for you.” While the address is not actually directed to us as readers, it effectively pulls us in, making us part of the spectacle by drawing attention to our desire to have more access to the killer and to understand her better. As the Professor puts it, the death notes have “the tone of terror. Or of intimacy.” It is that collapse between those two feelings that asks us to consider our role in the consumption of these images. Are we readers, spectators, voyeurs, or demanding lovers? According to the killer, we can not ultimately hide as innocent consumers. In “Message No. 7,” she writes: “Those who analyze, murder. I’m sure you knew that, Professor. Those who read carefully, dismember. We all kill.” In another, the murderer’s knife and the writer’s pen are equated. Asking the Professor to join her, the killer writes: “If you were to do it, you too would notice the knife’s soft precision as it slides over the skin, the blood’s sinuous sensuality”—and then, referencing her own charged words, she adds: “You too would like this. My letter…the ink’s erotic gleam.”

Rivera Garza is not only interested in acts of reading and their relation to violence but also in the specific forms that make violence reading’s very narrative architecture. The detective novel and narcoliterature are often invoked to draw attention to our desire for a narrative arc, to our constant consumption of the images of dead women, and ultimately to the fact that we are often more interested in the stories of the dead as fictional narratives—the twists and turns of a murderer’s plot are privileged over a senseless death’s material consequences.

Narcoliterature, a controversial genre that spans Latin American letters, can count some of its best-known figures, including Roberto Bolaño and Yuri Herrera, as adherents. The genre has received criticism for reinforcing stereotypes of violence and for resurrecting the dead for selfish aims. One might think that, as someone who has experienced firsthand the effects of feminicidio, Rivera Garza would be immune to this type of critique; however, she’s also garnered criticism for reprising scenes of violence. She has often asked whether her own engagement with depictions of brutality—literary or otherwise—normalizes and perpetuates the violence that pervades the regional imagination. While in essays and interviews Rivera Garza has offered answers, here she leaves these questions unbearably unresolved. During one of the Professor’s first meetings with the Detective, she contemplates the gendering of the word victim in Spanish as always feminine: victima. The Detective pauses and asks, “Are you laughing?” The Professor, before explaining, stops to think, “in the most untimely way,” that “the murderer was really a murderess.” In other words, the female gender of the word victima is rarely questioned because a victim is only ever a woman. While this interaction points to Rivera Garza’s larger project—her attempt to draw attention to the gendered nature of violence—it also underlines the perverse pleasure that the Professor finds in imagining the murderer as a woman.