La muerte me da

by Cristina Rivera Garza

Todo empieza el dia en que una mujer descubre accidentalmente el cadaver castrado de un hombre joven. El cuerpo yace sobre el asfalto, al fondo de un callejon, acompanado de unos misteriosos versos de la poeta argentina Alejandra Pizarnik. Cuando la mujer que se hace llamar Cristina Rivera Garza notifica su hallazgo a la policia se convierte, de inmediato y de manera automatica, en la Informante. Que ha visto? Que cree que signifiquen aquellos versos? Por que continuan apareciendo, en diferentes rincones de la ciudad, las mismas hombres jovenes, torturados, cercenados? Dos mujeres la Periodista de la Nota Roja, levemente jorobada, y la infatigable Detective del Departamento de Investigacion de Homicidios se empenan en resolver un caso que depara, como toda la historia, mas sorpresas que respuestas. Solo una cosa es el lector esta ante un thriller intenso y vertiginoso donde nada, ni siquiera la lectura, es inocente. Una novela perturbadora, ferozmente contemporanea.

Genres: Fiction, Mystery, Thriller, Mystery Thriller, Crime, Poetry, Literary Fiction

359 pages

First published January 1, 2007

About the author

Cristina Rivera Garza is the author of numerous works of fiction and non-fiction. Originally written in Spanish, these works have been translated into English, French, Italian, Portuguese, Korean, and more. Born in Mexico in 1964, she has lived in the United States since 1989. She is Distinguished Professor in Hispanic Studies and Director of Creative Writing at the University of Houston and was awarded the MacArthur “Genius” Grant in 2020.

Reviews

[emma · Rating 1 out of 5]

this is very stylized fiction with a protagonist that has the author's name and chapters randomly in verse or footnotes and several astonishingly literary sex scenes.

i'm telling you these things because they really paint a picture i wish i was aware of going in.

when books are intensely stylized (and i would say the writing of this is so pretentious as to qualify), i have a little test i do to see if this is brilliance or laziness.

in my purview, a lot of books try to be unique and/or abstract and/or artistic, and some of them do so because that is the Author's Vision while others see a shallow attempt as the easiest path toward being classified a Work Of Art.

i measure whether it's one or the other by the internal discipline.

sure, go crazy on the adverbs, suddenly dedicate 30 pages to an encyclopedic bio of a poet with footnotes included, make every chapter 2 pages long and at least two-thirds of it dedicated to describing penises, but: remember what you wrote and stick to it.

within one of these tiny chapters, a man previously described as totally naked is said to have pants on, and a detective and assistant for the department of homicides list their work as drug-dealing and international missing persons cases.

that point is when i lost my patience.

this book is a lot of things it tries to be — unique, boundary-pushing, full of phrases like “Too heavy a comforter (comfort-her? for her comfort?” — but it's not worth your time.

bottom line: so frustrating and yet so forgettable.

(thanks to the publisher for the e-arc)

[Billy · Rating 1 out of 5]

Very apt title because throughout the book I often wished death would take me

[Alwynne · Rating 4 out of 5]

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.

Thanks to Netgalley and publisher Bloomsbury for an ARC

Rating: 3.5

[Roman Clodia · Rating 4 out of 5]

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?

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, Luce Irigaray and Hélène Cixous 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 Alejandra Pizarnik 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 Emily Dickinson's abandonment of conventional punctuation which renders her poetry free of authoritative grammatical structures and artists such as Marina Abramović whose performance art aims to disturb viewers but who also deliberately 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.

Many thanks to Bloomsbury for an ARC via NetGalley

[BookOfCinz · Rating 1 out of 5]

Am I slow?

Can someone explain to me what this book was about like I am 4 years old?

[Erin · Rating 2 out of 5]

ARC for review. To be published February 25, 2025.

Translated from the Spanish by Robin Myers and Sarah Booker.

1.5 stars. Barely. Some people will like this more than I did.

Fun fact: in Spanish the word “victim” is always feminine. Oh, so much here.

Professor Cristina Rivera Garza (yep, that’s the author, but this isn’t non-fiction. How very….meta. Wait. No it isn’t.) finds a mutilated corpse in an alley and calls the police. As you would do. If this is NOT what you would do…tell me more. Oh, and forget you ever knew my name.

When she and the detective investigating the crime see the crime scene photos….wait, this can’t be right. I have it in my notes, but surely they wouldn’t let HER look at the photos. Anyway, SOMEONE notices a poem on a brick wall by the body. It’s by Alejandra Pizarnik.

Additional mutilated bodies continue to turn up around the city and each castrated man has an additional Pizarnik poem somewhere near the body. The detective, who has had issues in the past, becomes obsessed with both the verse and with finding the killer.

I guess if you come to your crime novels looking for an exploration of Latin American poetry you are in luck. However for the rest of us this is tedious, pretentious and really has absolutely nothing to say. Skip it.

[Luz C. Johnson · Rating 2 out of 5]

La muerte me da: Esta es una propuesta literaria que rompe esquemas establecidos: transgrede, descuartiza (el lenguaje, el texto, los personajes) (literalmente). Esquizofrénica. Un pene. No es para tanto. Un pene sólo es un pene. ¿Habrá más castrados? ¿Quizá el número cinco nos ayude a descubrir al asesin@ serial? Inicialmente, me emocionó la propuesta de la escritora, pero lamentablemente la lectura se hizo cansada y tediosa, con muchas repeticiones de La Mujer Que Lleva el Vaso Casi Vacío, o el Hombre que Quien Sabe Que Fregados Podía Ser Pero Que No Era o Se Parecía al Que Era. En fin, un nombre propio hubiese simplificado muchísimo esta cuestión que se vuelve chocante, y más bien molesta. La autora decide dedicarle un ensayo --a la mitad de la novela --a una poeta argentina, interrumpiendo la historia por completo. El ensayo en sí ni siquiera viene al caso, pues no le agrega nada a la historia, al contrario, le quita mucho mérito, pues ya para ese entonces estaba irritada, confundida y ya con ganas de regresar a la trama inicial del misterio: ¿Quién castró a esos hombres? La recta final fue un verdadero suplicio; me daban ganas de aventar el libro por la ventana, y lo hubiera hecho de no ser porque tenía que devolverlo a la biblioteca. Me sentí defraudada, pues leí sus cuentos, y me gustaron, pero este material de plano no cuajo. Interesante propuesta, o experimento que quiere integrar ensayo, cuento y novela de misterio, pero es eso –un experimento - y termina por no ser ni ensayo, ni cuento ni novela. Y lo que es peor: una lectura tediosa y poco disfrutable.

[S̶e̶a̶n̶ · Rating 4 out of 5]

Dying in the languid writing of the words to die, hopelessly.

As in Rivera Garza’s earlier novel The Iliac Crest, a ghostly writer wanders these pages. In that novel, it was Mexican crafter of strange stories Amparo Davila, and here we have the troubled Argentine poet Alejandra Pizarnik. And, as in the later novel The Taiga Syndrome, a detective grapples with a mystery, the solving of which becomes less likely as the delicate, friable narrative constricts and expands, contorts and unravels, at times on the verge of collapsing under its own inter- and metatextual weight. Ostensibly a novel, this book also comprises a draft research article, a poetry manuscript (that shares the novel’s title), and a series of messages slipped under the office door of the narrator (who shares the author’s name and profession). Rivera Garza does not so much construct a narrative as lead her characters through the eroded (and encoded) semblance of one, like pilgrims on a dusty, circuitous route destined to end—ultimately—not in enlightenment but in death. We sit by and watch the Detective and her male subordinate Valerio bobbing on the choppy surface of a fractured temporal sea, their heads in constant danger of slipping below, chasing the words of a dead woman poet scrawled at the crime scenes of castrated men, left to die around the city. But there are no answers; there are only wounds and the violence that yields them, spreading across a landscape of forsaken desire. (3.5 rounded up)

[Stephanie Peterman · Rating 1 out of 5]

“what about the penises?” “the penis is the key.”

wtf did i just read? i’m clearly not smart or pretentious enough to even pretend i understood this.

[Jonathan · Rating 5 out of 5]

4.5 rounded up

“It’s true, death takes me in the throes of sex”
.
“I want my misery to be translated into the utmost possible beauty”
-Both Alejandra Pizarnik
.
Flora Alejandra Pizarnik has been one of, if not my favorite, poet since I first discovered her some eight years ago, her collection “Extracting the stone of madness” has been read and reread until there was little left for me to underline, highlight, or notate. She was an unusual poet hailing from Argentina born to jewish emigrants from Russia. Her writing is some of the most moving, dark, delirious and fascinating poetry I’ve ever experienced, all made more surreal by her tragic suicide in 72’ when she was a mere 36 years old
.
Now that I have introduced the muse let me talk about Cristinia Rivera Garza’s upcoming novel “Death takes me”. It is an homage to Pizarnik, the lyrical prose poem style of writing, the way that her work incredulously brings the entire entity of this serene experimental novel together. I say experimental but it’s more so a conglomeration of writing styles and forms that converge over the course of 97 chapters that drift in and out of the lines of insanity
.
So, the novel takes place in Mexico and revolves around the ever present violence within the society, just see a Roberto Bolańo novel for insight. However Garza makes her victims male, a twist on the often written femicide that takes place within the countries limits, a snark contrast to the norm, and not only are the victims male, they are ritualistically castrated and left with a message at each crime scene. Those messages are excerpts from poems written by Alejandra Pizarnik
.
Garza herself is a character within the novel, a professor who seems to know quite a bit about Pizarnik, and she serves as a connector for the two main detectives on the case, she helps them understand the complexities of the poet, the prose in which she wrote, the way she relates to the murders and castration of the men, and with hope she will lead them to the murderer, or murderess. Included in the middle is a 20 odd page almost biography of Pizarnik written by the fictional Garza, just to help understand who this underrated poet was, a sprawling beautiful touch to the already incredulous array of styles the real Garza uses to tell this narrative
.
I do feel like this is an ingenious novel, I loved 95% of it ( save for a slow slog at about the halfway mark) the way that Garza incapsulates the prose that Pizarnik wrote with and mirrored it within the narration of this book was gorgeous. She really outdid herself mixing the beauty and macabre as she so often has done in the past. She also includes horrific art and artist’ work that lends itself to the crime scene views, specifically the Chapman Brothers “Great deeds against the dead” and Francisco Goya’s “Nothing. The Event Will Tell” Both works unsettling, morbid and incredible
.
There are many other works of art scattered throughout, a scavenger hunt of connections between the writing, the murders, and the stories. Quotes from French philosophers and artist, South American thinkers and writers, and most importantly Pizarnik herself is quoted infamously throughout, citing even her love for Kafkas diaries, as it never left her bedside. All these little pieces form a bigger whole, the larger picture may not be as exciting as the smatterings of intrigue that I found. Though just when I didn’t think Garza could impress me more she wrote a 16 part prose poem from the killers perspective, a poem that was published by an independent publisher under a non de plume but ultimately admitting to the heinous crimes and the reasons for, again a work of art within the novel that needs to be read and reread, dissected like the very men at the crime scenes
.
Im not sure what else I can say, this will be a DNF for a lot of people I sadly feel, but for some it will be a genre defying work of art, like it was for me. Like an onion you have to peel back the layers and find what is lurking in the shadows of every name, every poem, every sinister act, because at the end of the day “We violate a book in order to read it, but we offer it closed”-Edmond Jabès

[Iris · Rating 1 out of 5]

Hmmm... ¿Qué puedo decir? No es del tipo de libros que suelo leer. Fue una lectura muy cansada y pesada para mí y más de una vez quise arrojarlo por la ventana de un rascacielos. Entendí la mitad de lo que estaba sucediendo, o eso creo, talvez sí entendí todo y solamente pienso que no. El ensayo que trae por ahí metido ni lo pude leer, me lo brinqué por completo. Y la trama, la trama es nada al final. La trama me atrapó, pero el estilo de narración y la experimentación me perdió. Lo terminé de leer, más que nada por saber cómo terminaba la trama. Vaya desilusión. La trama no era lo importante del libro, la trama era un personaje secundario o terciario. El misterio fue resuelto de la forma más estúpida que pudo haber sido resuelto, en mi opinión. No se lo recomendaría a nadie. Es bueno si quieres experimentar con otros estilos de narración o qué sé yo, pero creo que no vale la pena.

[Carlos · Rating 5 out of 5]

Pero no quiero hablar de la muerte
ni de sus extrañas manos.

El manuscrito, dirigido al dueño de la editorial, llegó en un sobre sin remitente. Eran unas cuantas hojas de poesía firmadas por una tal Anne-Marie Bianco. Lo repitió varias veces. Algo le decía aquel nombre. Finalmente, la editorial especializada en autores desconocidos y textos vanguardistas, decidió publicar el libro de esa autora invisible e inexistente, cuyo título enigmático, afirmación categórica e inconclusa, encierra el meollo de la trama y bien podría ser, su única justificación viable: La muerte me da.

El fantasma de una escritora argentina ronda las calles solitarias de una ciudad que es cementerio, donde cuerpos mutilados yacen en un inexplicable ritual de venganza y frustración. Sobre las baldosas, una mano segura, exquisita caligrafía estilizada, ha escrito un trozo de poema que descubre una profesora, cuyo andar presuroso y sed demencial revelan lo agitado de una vida complicada, de la escuela a su casa, en un ir y venir presuroso que apenas es interrumpido por la Detective, de sonrisa irónica y frases justas, acostumbrada a la luz artificial de su oficina, pálida y lechosa, en el subsuelo olvidado de la comisaría, donde intenta esclarecer junto con su ayudante Valerio, las otras muertes que de igual forma han ido apareciendo, siempre iguales: hombres de unos treinta años amputados por manos expertas, bisturí que corta a la perfección y sin titubeos, el contorno de aquello que después, dentro de un frasco con formol, será parte de su colección particular, en la estantería de una vieja y enmohecida alacena. Sí. Todo esto lleva el aire de la nota roja, esas columnas en periódicos mediocres que alimentan el morbo de sus lectores sedientos de sangre, vampiros que pululan la noche y descienden en manada, guiados por el olfato que ha percibido ya el cuerpo putrefacto, en el tétrico Callejón del Castrado.

Un thriller magníficamente concebido y desarrollado, donde se mezclan diarios, poesía, ficción y ensayo, en un conjunto de noventa y siete capítulos que giran como una ruleta (“cada poema suyo es el cubo de una inmensa rueda”, dijo alguna vez su amigo, Julio Cortázar), alrededor de la poesía de Alejandra Pizarnik, cuya fusión con su vida doblegada (“¿por qué es eterno sufrir?, ¿de que soy culpable?”, escribió con tono urgente en su diario), produjo una obra singular por su fuerza, desahogo que es grito desesperado y revela el sufrimiento de su existencia: el miedo que ensombreció sus días, teñidos por el fracaso de una vida vacía. Muerte e infancia, dos extremos de su trabajo literario que son constantes en su poesía, deambular sumiso, consignas angustiosas, aullidos atormentados. La búsqueda eterna de la luz al otro lado del túnel, que finalmente desaparecería para dejarla en completa oscuridad aquel 25 de septiembre de 1972, en que el frasco con pastillas de Seconal sería, al menos por un instante (¿que es la eternidad, sino varios instantes?), linterna mágica y el vaho inconfundible del último suspiro. Proeza silenciosa, que terminaría para siempre con esas voces internas, inquilinos indeseables, cientos de nefastas cucarachas en constante reproducción, que la torturaron sin cesar y fueron a la vez, la semilla innegable de su obra.

Toda novela es una propuesta. La muerte me da es un proyecto audaz y singular, estructura versátil, donde brilla la creatividad y estupenda calidad narrativa de Cristina Rivera Garza, que sin duda expande la forma, abriendo las entrañas de un género añejo (de reglas igualmente rancias), ávido de una inyección de vida, vacuna certera que da en el blanco.


Jardín recorrido en lágrimas,
habitantes que besé
cuando mi muerte aún no había nacido.
En el viento sagrado
tejían mi destino.

Alejandra Pizarnik (1936-1972)

__

[cycads and ferns · Rating 3 out of 5]

Accustomed as I am to narrators who long, with a truly vehement longing, to access poetry, it does not cease to astonish me that a poet, a great poet like Alejandra Pizarnik, describes prose as a house she does not have. It surprises me, I mean, that by making prose into a safe house, she refers to poetry, by sheer contrast, as exposure to the elements. A kind of danger. A defenselessness.

[Brianna · Rating 1 out of 5]

oh. my god. This was such a painful read. It's been a long time since I read an author that felt so insufferable and where you could just feel how smart they think they are.

I spent money on this. Boo.

[charlotte, · Rating 2 out of 5]

Rep: Mexican cast & setting

Galley provided by publisher

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.

[Lauren · Rating 1 out of 5]

this put me in a reading slump

[Ose · Rating 2 out of 5]

Meh

Ahora entiendo porqué tardé tanto en leerlo. Me encanta la manera de escribir de Cristina, pero este libro es tedioso, muy tedioso, además de repetitivo. También creo que, al final, no supo aprovechar el elemento de Pizarnik e, igualmente, todo el asunto de los asesinados, víctimas y castrados fue un desperdicio; no lleva a básicamente nada.

La idea era buena peeeeeero la ejecución deja mucho que desear...

[Fanny ♡ (fanny_priceyre) · Rating 2 out of 5]

No entendí nada. 😅 Sé me hizo muy pesado y sentí que tenía que tener un gran conocimiento de Alejandra Pizarnik. No fue para mi.

[César R. Luna · Rating 3 out of 5]

Yo no sé si soy yo solamente, pero la prosa de Cristina Rivera Garza me deja más que aturdido, quizás por su cercanía con la poesía y ese aparente sinsentido que no me deja leerla de corrido. Pero a la vez, me declaro culpable de no entenderla del todo y probablemente la esté subestimando, por ignorante.

Me conmueve, eso sí, el uso de la palabra de manera extravagante, a borbotones, sin medida como el agua en un río. A veces críptica, a veces delirante, hay extravagancia, hay alucinaciones. Escribir así me parece que requiere valentía, un gran esfuerzo lingüístico y un trabajo mental bastante generoso.

Lo que me pareció más interesante de todo fue el tema de la poeta Alejandra Pizarnik -a la cual nunca he leído - y su anhelo por la prosa que se repite ad nauseam a lo largo de la historia. Su poesía pareciera que adquiere una vida propia.

Definitivamente fue un reto leer La muerte me da. Este es un libro a ratos brillante y otros tantos me provocaron un sopor irremediable. La repetición es recurrente y se siente que no llega a ningún lado pasando por conclusiones metafísicas bastante vagas y borrosas, como de ensueño. En más de una ocasión logró sacarme de quicio.

Supongo que debí darme cuenta desde el principio, por su título, que este sería un texto castrado, mutilado...la frase cortada con un filo. Con todo y todo, considero que es una autora que quiero seguir leyendo.

[Ben Evans-Duran · Rating 3 out of 5]

If I was of higher intellect I’m sure this would have blown me away. Some beautiful prose, but lost on me.

[Jordan · Rating 2 out of 5]

I’m fundamentally uninterested in penis as metaphor

[Claire Bartholomew · Rating 3 out of 5]

If you've ever read a book with a furrowed brow the entire time, wondering if you're missing something or if the book is deliberately obtuse, you'll be familiar with the experience of reading this book. This is nominally a story about a spree of gruesome murders (you should probably know going into this book that there are some graphic depictions of men dead who have been castrated), but it's more like a blend of genres - with poetry dominating by far - with shifting perspectives and perhaps purposely disorienting prose.

I debated between giving this book two or three stars because I was profoundly disappointed with it. The premise really gave me a lot to think about - flipping the prevalence of violence against women on its head, delving into the way society simultaneously glorifies and dehumanizes victims of horrible crimes, the power of language to create our own reality, etc. But unfortunately, really none of that came from the book itself. I felt like I was grafting my own meaning onto the book, and I don't always mind doing that, but the way this book was written felt almost condescending, as if I was supposed to be a sleuth understanding all the references and just following wildly as the book just careened around. This book had so much promise, but it really didn't have any sort of impact on me.

Thanks to NetGalley and Random House for an advanced reader's copy in exchange for an honest review!

[Bill Hsu · Rating 3 out of 5]

This starts with a series of violent killings. Then the noir-ish detective procedures evolve into Rivera Garza's thoughtful play with language and texts, which should be familiar to her fans. Her prose is usually a pleasure, though I admit I was longing for a little more of the narrative trappings. And I might have to check out some of Pizarnik's poetry.

[Curtis · Rating 3 out of 5]

What's with all these people dying just because their dicks got cut off? Slap a bandage on it, take some painkillers, and make sure to be at work on time in the morning.

[Kyle C · Rating 3 out of 5]

When we hear the words "forensics" or "autopsy", the conventional words of the procedural crime drama, we tend to think about scientific labs, blood samples, fingerprinting, the examination of a corpse, coroners and police poring over the macabre specter of a cracked-open body. Historically, however, these words had a very different, and mundane, origin. The word "forensic" derives from the Roman forum—a place where orators arguing a case would discuss the evidence and try to convince a jury of someone's guilt or innocence, no scientific inquests or lab reports involved. The word "autopsy" is Greek and it literally meant "seeing for oneself". Autopsy referred to the investigation of facts through first-hand examination of evidence, rather than oral report or theoretical speculation. Over time, the words "forensics" and "autopsy" narrowed in their meaning: they now describe the systematic and the scientific inspection of a crime scene and the victim's body. But their etymology points to a broader truth: a crime scene is not a scientific problem; it is a semiotic puzzle, something that needs to be interpreted, something that must be contested, something we must look at in person and solve through hermeneutics (Umberto Eco's The Name of the Rose is a classic in the meta-murder-mystery narrative, making the detective's investigation an exercise in scholastic metaphysics).

In Cristina Rivera Garza's surreal and cerebral novel, there has been a slew of murders: in quick succession, the cleanly dismembered bodies of castrated men are discovered around the city; the words of the Argentine poet Alejandra Pizarnik are scrawled beside each body (in nail polish or with magazine letters—obviously female-coded lettering). What does any of this mean? Is the castration some grizzly act of female vengeance, a violent way to emasculate the men by removing their physical sex? Or is it an expression of phallic envy, someone desperate to have, physically, the male member? Or could this all be the result of some cuckolded man who, discovering his wife's infidelity, has taken the penis in retaliation? Or perhaps there is something more symbolic here. Since the word "victim" is grammatically feminine in Spanish, is this act of castration meant in some way to reinscribe the fundamental femininity of victimhood, to make the men into conventional female victims? Or, to take a literary turn, is the dismemberment some form of metapoetic commentary? In her letters, Alejandra Pizarnik wanted to write not poetry but prose—yet she found her own prose to be fragmented ("I'm missing the subject. Then I'm being the missing verb. What's left is a mutilated predicate, tattered attributes...And above all, a sort of castration of the ear: I cannot perceive the melody of the sentence"). The poet Horace wrote (Sermones 1.4) that if you rearranged verses into prose, you would have the "limbs of dismembered poet" (disiecti membra poetae)—so are the remains of these men, these hacked-up and castrated corpses, a tangible act of literary criticism, morbid attempts at perversely writing in prose with men's limbs?

On the case is an unlikely trio: a female detective who writes bafflingly philosophical police reports, a tabloid journalist who possibly poses as an avant-garde poet, and a professor specializing in Alejandra Pizarnik (who, coincidentally, is named Cristina Rivera Garza—a stand-in or a foil for our own author?) But far from solving the case, the three of them seem, on some psychological and aesthetic level, more similar to the murderer, and more interested in understanding the verses of Pizarnik than identifying the killer. They feel a rapport with the murderer (and possibly the murderer is equally interested in them—purporting to leave obsessive letters at the home of Cristina Rivera Garza). There is a linguistic parity between the killer, the writer and the literary critic: the killer breaks open bodies; the critic opens up books. The killer slices into skin; the critic looks inside the text ("the writer: a coroner who writes down everything that emerges from inside"). The killer dissects; the writer, at least Alejandra Pizarnik, "suffers from the vivisection of isolated words"; this murderer cuts off limbs; in this book, "those who read carefully, dismember". There is an isomorphy between the gruesome act of the serial killer and the seemingly innocuous act of penetrating the text. The killer deals with a corpse; readers deal with a corpus.

This is, in so many ways, an incomprehensible book. There is a refrain throughout, "Who the hell is speaking?" a frustration not just voiced by the characters but felt by the reader, too. The "I" of many chapters could be the detective, her partner, the professor, the journalist, even the murderer. The narrative, if there is narrative, often devolves into desultory lists and fragmentary sentences. It is hallucinatory and delirious at many points. It felt, in many ways, like an inversion of Bolaño's 2666: where his fusillade novel describes a nauseating catalogue of anonymous murdered women, Cristina Rivera Garza's Death Takes Me revolves around nameless castrated men and unnamed narrators, male victims and female investigators, blurred and undifferentiated. This novel is a murder mystery but it is not interested in solving the mystery; rather it turns inward into the mystery of language, identity and personhood. It transforms the whodunit into a more existential question of who.

Interesting, but also painfully enigmatic.

[jocelyn • coolgalreading · Rating 4 out of 5]

i can understand why ppl wouldn't jive with the style of this but i found it v compelling

[Oscreads · Rating 5 out of 5]

GIVE THIS WRITER THE NOBEL PRIZE!!

[mali · Rating 3 out of 5]

this was so much work to get through...

the beginning was rough to get into, enjoyed and loved some of it but by the final half I was well done and over with it. Cristina rivera Garza's prose is beautiful and I found myself underlining quite a bit of this but i so wish she focused less on the "poetry prose", as it got convoluted. it got really confusing to follow the narrative and to understand which of the characters was speaking. I also fear that this is very much a me problem, im not familiar with Alejandra pizarnik's work or her style of writing which garza imitated through the majority of the book.

I wish I was smarter to understand this but alas I am not, I loved what little I understood though

[Susan Tunis · Rating 3 out of 5]

There's a lot going on here, and the writing was beautiful--the parts translated to English, that is--but this just didn't come together as a cohesive work. There were all of these pieces: the crime novel, the poetry, the social commentary, etc. The whole very much did not equal the sum of its parts.

Simply put, not an enjoyable reading experience. Bummer.

[Marc Nash · Rating 5 out of 5]

Video review https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Dsc9...