Book Review - Death Takes Me

Drug cartels in Mexico have been known to dismember their victims or leave messages on their bodies threatening their rivals, or glorifying in their gore. Femicide in the country is endemic. Cristina Rivera Garza’s memoir Liliana’s Invincible Summer (TLS, November 10, 2023), which concerned the murder in 1990 of her sister by her sister’s ex-boyfriend, Ángel González Ramos, and the wider theme of gender-based violence, won the Pulitzer prize. Ramos escaped justice but a consequence of the book was that Rivera Garza discovered his

whereabouts – he’d died in California under an assumed identity.

An earlier book, La muerte me da (2007), which now appears in English translation by Sarah Booker and Robin Myers as Death Takes Me, focuses on the murder and castration of four men. The novel opens with the discovery of a castrated corpse in an alley by a professor called Cristina Rivera Garza who reports the murder to the police. The killer leaves behind a fragment from a poem by the Argentinian writer Alejandra Pizarnik, who took her own life in 1972. Cristina becomes a prime suspect when further mutilated bodies are discovered accompanied by lines from Pizarnik’s poems written in lipstick, nail varnish and “castrated

letters”, clipped from newspapers and magazines. After the third murder, Cristina observes that, “in Spanish, the word victim, or victima, is always feminine”.

The detective who takes on the investigation, accompanied by her assistant Valerio, makes little headway as she visits relatives of the deceased and tries to decipher the poems. A tabloid journalist also becomes involved. The killer, meanwhile, starts to send cryptic messages to Cristina, adopting various names. Their narratives overlap and we often have to work out who is speaking. Related in ninety-seven short chapters, the novel takes on a nightmarish, hallucinogenic quality as it becomes increasingly convoluted.

Rivera Garza is known for her experimentalism, and Death Takes Me includes references to the work of Jake and Dinos Chapman, whose sculpture “Sex I” (2003), which reimagines Goya’s “Great Deeds Against the Dead”, explores mortality and decomposition: three male figures hanging from a tree trunk are missing their genitals. The Serbian conceptual artist Marina Abramović, who depicts violence against women in her art, also makes an appearance.

Exploring “the grammar of violence”, Rivera Garza questions: “Which aesthetic and ethical dialogues does the act of writing hurl us into when we are quite literally surrounded by corpses?” Eschewing a linear plot and playing with multiple meanings, this challenging novel attempts to answer that question but occasionally gets buried under the weight of its intertextuality.

Originally published by the TLS