Books Review: “Death Take Me”, by Cristina Rivera Garza

MelinaFebruary 26, 2025

3 4 minutes read

Death takes meby Cristina Rivera Garza. Translated by Sarah Booker and Robin Myers.

The crime which opens the “death” of Cristina Rivera Garza takes me unusual violence, described viscerally with the compression of a poet: “A collection of impossible angles. Skin, skin. … Ear. Foot. Sex. Something open red. A context. A boiling point. Something defeated. In an anonymous city, a man was murdered and castrated, his body left in an alley. The body is discovered by a professor named Cristina Rivera Garza, who is paid in the distinctions between literal and symbolic castration, and who also relates crime to the police.

While more castrated bodies are discovered and fear spreads, Cristina becomes both witness and suspect. She also appears as an improbable source of the investigation, helping to interpret the mysterious messages left with each crime scene: fragmented poetry lines, carefully written in a coral nail polish, or a lipstick, or cut letters magazines and newspapers. “Beware of me, my love”, We read a message of seduction and threat. While the killer escapes the understanding of Cristina and the police, the missives become more omnipresent, changing form, both tight and tormented, philosophical and disarticulated.

“Death Take Me” was published for the first time almost 20 years ago in its original Spanish. Now he arrives in the United States, translated transparently into English by Sarah Booker and Robin Myers. For American readers, he follows the publication of a handful of renowned titles Rive Garza, whose novel “The Iliac Crest” and the award -winning Pulitzer “Liliana’s Invincible Summer”. Many themes and techniques of these books appear here: sexospecific violence, misogyny, exploration of the possibilities and restrictions of the language.

“Death takes me” immediately establishes this link of ideas. The victims are men, the murders explicitly and strongly physical. But by describing the attacks, language itself makes its own secondary mutilation. As Cristina says, “There Víctima is always feminine. Do you see? … This word will castrate them again and again.

Still present in the work of Rivera Garza is an interest in a close interpretation – often, the interpretation of texts, whether poems, newspaper entries, letters or newspaper articles. In “Liliana’s invincible Summer”, will rive Garza herself guides the reader through the eponymous newspapers of Liliana and via interviews with her friends, while she carefully lists a portrait of her murdered sister.

“Death takes me” riffs on these same ideas and patterns. We have again a Cristina Rivera Garza, working to interpret a text in the arena of life and death with high issues – only this time, she is a fictitious narrator, and history is a detective story instead of ‘A dark personal calculation.

But this detective novel radically blurs what we think and how we relation to the genre. The book presents part of the standard price of the mystery: there are bodies and clues, suspects and surveys, a spicy feeling of fear and discomfort. And there are funny leading to familiar archetypes (the Tabloid journalist is named “the tabloid journalist”; the detective is “the detective”, a recurring character throughout the work of Rivera Garza). But the path of apprehension of the culprit does not take place by a procedural hunt but via an improbable act of literary criticism.

The missives that the killer leaves on the scene of each crime prove to be withdrawn lines from the poetry of the great Argentinian writer Alejandra Pizarnik. These clues are what initially obliges the detective to contact Cristina; She recognizes that the case is “full of psychological corners and corners. Poetic shadows. Gender traps. Metaphors. Metonyms. »»

This also describes the exceptional style of Rivera Garza, and the deeply enriching experience of reading “Death takes me”. The novel is dense and elliptical, a dream landscape with a powerful company. The texts proliferate throughout it: the quotes from Pizarnik, an academic article entitled “The desire for prose”, a collection of poetry. Perhaps the most relevant is a series of intensely personal, confessional but unclear messages sent to Cristina. Their writer benefits from a cover of changing nicknames quickly: from Joachima Abramović to Gina Pane to Lynn Hershman. The identification of the author of these texts, fixing the name attached to the messages, seems to go hand in hand with the identification of the killer.

Rivera Garza once described writing as “greeting like another for the first time”. It is “the opposite to know each other,” she continued. “Incredible, it would be an appropriate term to describe … What I thought was writing.” Unsurprisingly, Rivera Garza does not follow the conventions of the mystery story, the narrowing of a multitude of names to one. Instead, the novel increasingly vast as restrictions around identity become loose and more cowardly, encompassing more and more.

In this heartbreaking and labyrinthine masterpiece, Rivera Garza will finally go a little further, involving shallow readers themselves. Each mystery puts the reader in the detective position – Read for clues, guess possible solutions – but in “Death takes me”, Rivera Garza does more than doing this parallel literal. The novel maintains that reading is not only a detective work or a form of interrogation; It is deadly, in itself. Reader, writer, killer collide. As the editor of anonymous messages from the novel says: “Those who analyze, murder. I’m sure you knew it, a teacher. Those who read carefully, dismember. We all kill.