The Taiga Syndrome

by Cristina Rivera Garza, Suzanne Jill Levine (Translator), Aviva Kana (Translator)

A fairy tale run amok, The Taiga Syndrome follows an unnamed Ex-Detective as she searches for a couple who has fled to the far reaches of the earth. A betrayed husband is convinced by a brief telegram that his second ex-wife wants him to track her down—that she wants to be found. He hires the Ex-Detective, who sets out with a translator into a snowy, hostile forest where strange things happen and translation betrays both sense and one’s senses. Tales of Hansel and Gretel and Little Red Riding Hood haunt the Ex-Detective’s quest into a territory overrun with the primitive excesses of Capitalism—accumulation and expulsion, corruption and cruelty—though the lessons of her journey are more experiential than moral: that just as love can fly away, sometimes unloving flies away as well. That sometimes leaving everything behind is the only thing left to do.

Genres: Fiction, Mystery, Fantasy, Horror, Magical Realism, Novella, Literary Fiction

128 pages, Kindle Edition

First published May 1, 2012

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

[s.penkevich [hiatus-will return-miss you all] · Rating 4 out of 5]

We all carry a forest inside us…

‘This is not a fairy tale, detective,’ an unnamed man seeking out his second wife tells the narrator early on in Cristina Rivera Garza’s eerily exquisite nightmare of a novel The Taiga Syndrome. The man has a penchant for leading women by the elbow to corral them without consent into the confines of his ego and is bewildered that his second wife has run off with a man into the vast wilderness of the taiga.

Taiga (noun): also known as a boreal forest or snow forest, is a biome characterized by coniferous forests consisting mostly of pines, spruces, and larches.

Taiga Syndrome (noun): ‘inhabitants of the Taiga begin to suffer terrible anxiety attacks and make suicidal attempts to escape’

‘We all carry a forest inside us, yes’ the narrator later says, meaning a wilderness we escape into, or escape from. This includes the wife who fills diaries with bland entries but occasionally questions what it is a bird can see when they look into a window. The wife has left, leaving a breadcrumb trail of postcards with lines like “WHAT ARE WE LETTING IN WHEN WE SAY GOODBYE?” scrawled in ‘the urgency of capital letters’. Thus begins a journey to find the missing woman. Along the way, the narrator detective finds herself immersed in a haunting fairy tale in which language, love and leaving are all menacing eyes peering out from the dark forests of the taiga to watch the oppressive ways that capitalist power corrupts, controls and consumes us. Here is a detective noir with surrealism filling in for the usual motif of fog, creating a metaphorical fog out of language and the various ways storytelling and society is framed through power constructs. Unsettling in the best of ways, The Taiga Syndrome is a stunning achievement of atmosphere and language that marvelously blends fairy tale with social commentary to question the choice of being confined in oppressive structure or lost forever in a metaphysical wilderness. And everywhere are wolves.

The Taiga Syndrome takes the baton from the rich history of Latin American literature and races with it deep into the forest like a cross country runner. Brazo’s Bookstore provides a blurb, noting that the novel feels like ‘A detective novel directed by David Lynch & narrated by Bolaño.’, and comparisons to Juan Rulfo as well as undercurrents of Silvina Ocampo and Leonora Carrington are easy enough (and, possibly, lazy) to make. The book is, arguably, all of these (like Rulfo’s Pedro Páramo, both deal with a location where the inability to leave accrues with each page like an hourglass running out of sand), yet comparisons distract from the fact that this is an entirely original piece combining these elements with those of fairy tales--Hansel and Gretel as well as Little Red Riding Hood are directly called out and analyzed in the narrative--to create an engrossing work of feminist and social symbolism that is way more than the sum of its parts. The playfulness of archetypal motifs and symbols from both fairy tales and noirs being thrown into a linguistic blender is part of one of the book’s most entertaining methods of building atmosphere: everything is familiar yet horrifyingly alien all at once.

’Breathlessly’ is an adverb with rhythm.’

The book is nearly a sensory overload of sights, sounds, smells and ineffable anxiety all emanating from static words on the page so potent that they bear a resemblance to how silent trees in a dark forest can culminate in a pitch of implacable terror once you begin to question what lurks in their shadows. Cristina Rivera Garza employs language to its maximum potential with minimal strokes that take unexpected turns. The language is sparse yet dense and flows almost like poetry instead of prose. There are incomplete sentences, repetitions of phrases, and musings that loop and swirl as if to elude the reader. There is also an astonishing use of language that makes the narration feels unstuck from linear time. Not only is the book told in a non-linear fashion, but also sentences eloquently push and pull the reader back and forth on the timeline leaving the reader unsettled yet unjarred. Time, it seems, is one of the many social constructs being called into question by the novel. It is told from a present long after the events have unfolded and sometimes within the span of a single sentence places you in the past, uses future tenses to explain what will happen and then seamlessly returns to past tense verbs. The effect, I imagine, is much more poetically visible in the original Spanish but still shines in translation.

Being a translated work actually adds to the noir fog of the narrative in an interesting way as translation is a major theme in the novel. The detective is accompanied on her journey by a translator (several archetypal characters here, as well as the husband and vanished wife, though the principal characters have a far more emotionally complex execution than simple archetypal stand-ins) and muses on the concept that they are ‘tongue to tongue: a speaker of their tongue who would translate everything into my tongue’. The pair quickly realize that her ‘tongue’ is also not the ideal mode of communication between them and they settle for a neutral, third language in which they are both comfortable speaking. The wonderful translation by Suzanne Jill Levine and Aviva Kana also serves as a reminder that we, like the detective, are receiving the narrative through a filter of translated language.

In fact, the various filters of reality--like the fog in a noir--become a constant reminder of how we view the world through windows of social constructs.Windows figure as a prominent motif in the novel: what we see from the safety of looking out and what sees us in the wild looking in. ‘The rectangle is often a sacred shape,’ the unnamed detective says, the window that encloses, boxes us in, creates a fallible framework to enforce easy comfort. There is frequent mention of people being viewed through windows, literal or metaphorical--the runaway couple viewed as outside the “window” of the small village society, even the sex workers are said to be appraised by men through a viewing window. Throughout the novel, the narrator is pulled from the comforts of a modern society, a society led by the elbow--quite literally--by the grip of obdurate, masculine-enforced constructs and into an untamable wilderness where all the filters of “normalcy” fail to rationalize what she is to find. ‘It is difficult to describe what is impossible to imagine,’ she repeats multiple times, as the impossible becomes the unsettling reality that the narrator attempts to comprehend. Wolves might simply be feral children, miscarriages might become a fairy tale menagerie, impossibility might stare you in the face until the window of normalcy shatters.

‘But what is money even worth in the middle of a boreal forest? A mere hallucination.’

The windows keep out violence and viscerality, but also keep us couched in blandness as we submit to a capitalist system that thrives on our complicity. Even in the Taiga the power system exists. The narrator visits the local, wealthy businessman who feared the missing wife and her male companion as spies intent on dethroning him from power when they came to town. Through his window of social constructs he viewed any ‘other’, any ‘outsider’ as a threat (or possibly a spy for a rival lumber company). He has become another of the figurative “wolves” in the story, so corrupted by money that he’s cut off humanity in fear of someone plotting to hurt his wealth.

Even the wilderness is being leashed by capitalism. The narrator detective muses on the livelihood of the lumberjacks and how their profits have tainted the purity of the chaotic forests. They enter the forests for their ‘daily survival’, and therefore ‘the needs of the lumberjacks had, in turn, brought cooks and merchants, usury and sex.’ Though this isn’t used as an argument against modernization, per say, it does show us how society tames us and cuts down our inner wilderness like a lumberjack clearing a forest.

The trees agree with me. In lumberjack’s pockets, in their gold teeth, in the chains that they wore around their neck, in their desire to leave forever, in their plans to return to some version of home that grew more remote the more they thought about it. Money shines with the patina of something sad or impossible. Something that should be condemned.’

The strive for money takes us further from nature into a prison of oppression and control where we can only look back out a window and fear the wilderness we have come from.

Perhaps the most important use of framing comes from the way that, instead of crafting the novel as a noir or fairy tale, Garza uses the elements of genre to frame her story. The elements are there, most notably the missing woman run off into the woods that seems to bridge both genres. Folklorist Jack Zipes once wrote that fairy tales are ‘a means to conquer the terrors of mankind through metaphor.’ Garza’s work aligns with this theory while occasionally feeling like it is the reversal by emphasizing the terrors of mankind as a metaphor for creating a fairy tale. The detective often reflects on the elements of fairy tales and how they interact with her own narrative, examining how the lack of food caused by social factors and oppression during the time the Grimm Brothers wrote Hansel and Gretel set the stage for the step-mother abandoning the children in the woods to not have to feed them anymore. The narrator suggests that framing the story as a cruel stepmother instead of the children’s actual mother was shielding readers from the harsh reality that parents under duress might actually sacrifice their children for self preservation. The forest is a cruel place and, even if we dress the human soul up in polite society, that violent wilderness is still inside. Garza has created a world with wolves lurking in all the shadows and reminds us that some wolves wear human skins.

In addition to framing the story in genre elements, Garza plays with a mixture of art forms by providing a suggested listening playlist in lieu of a soundtrack. While the playfulness and vivid imagery of the language already create a very sensory experience, combining it with music further amplifies the impression of immersing yourself in the forests of the Taiga.

‘All traveling’s a way to imagine having a home to leave or return to’ writes poet Brenda Shaughnessy. This line would make a fitting epigraph for The Taiga Syndrome, a novel of people escaping. Escaping life, society, reality, fleeing further and further, disappearing more and more. This is a novel about running, hiding, searching, about love and about the end of falling out of love. This brilliant, little novel put out but the wonderful Dorothy Publishing Project (check them out, easily one of the coolest small presses out there) is a surrealist romp that tantalizes as much as it terrorizes. This book creeps towards the precipice of trauma like dreams where you find yourself unable to scream, and by the time reality begins to crumble, the notion between what is real and what isn’t seems completely beside the point. Garza doesn’t just play with genre, she reconfigures them into a cocktail of her own design that you’ll be drunk off long after having drank the last drop.

⅘

‘Look at this: your knees. They are used for kneeling upon reality, also for crawling, terrified. You use them to sit on a lotus flower and say goodbye to the immensity.’

[Nate D · Rating 4 out of 5]

A man dispatches a failed detective to retrieve a fleeing wife from the taiga. The setup is laid for a noir or adventure story, and Garza shapes the narrative with attendant mysteries, menaces, and fairy tales, but as with her The Iliac Crest, the story actual drifts into some metaphysical space where plot is subordinated to concept, revolving thematics, and a reflexive concern for language. The latter, here, is generated by obscuring layers of translation -- the narrator does not speak the language of the taiga herfself, those she consults may dissemble or have never understood the question, and in the end the whole increasingly incomprehensible path of the story must be processed and reported for the waiting client. Thus, a tale at a remove: what of experience and second-hand experience may be accurately reported. This places the promise of excitement in the narrative somewhat at a remove, through a dirty window (as many reported scenes in fact take place), but the bits of story that do break through the layers are often entirely haunting, edging towards unknowable. And for all her intellectual reserve, Garza is equally capable of dark, unrestrained pure impulse. To be read and re-read, disentangled by slow and precise motions, which can nonetheless ever reach the heart of a wilderness in fact endless.

[Janie · Rating 4 out of 5]

A beautifully written novella.  The language is integral, surrounding the reader in a haze of clearly formed sentiments accompanied by feverish imagination and dark magic.  The Taiga Syndrome affects us all, regardless of our location.  Being found never implies that one is lost.

[Paul Fulcher · Rating 4 out of 5]

“WHAT ARE WE REALLY LETTING IN WHEN WE SAY GOODBYE?”

Translated from Cristina Rivera Garza's Spanish original, El mal de la taiga (2012), by Suzanne Jill Levine and Aviva Kana and published by And Other Stories (UK - 2019) / Dorothy Book Project (US - 2018). For And Other Stories this novel was part of their year of publishing women, and the author links this to her own literary manifesto:

In the wake of the #MeToo movement, as new generations of women worldwide forcibly expose the cruel nature of the gender hierarchies (and binaries) that structure our daily lives, while many reject the possibility of being either physically disappeared or culturally erased, the decision to only publish women authors may appear unusual, but it is urgent.

I am convinced that writing is a critical practice: true, bold, brave, formally adventurous writing should have the ability to change perceptions and experience; the disordering of the senses talked about by Rimbaud, inextricably linked with the disordering of everyday life as we know it. Producing unusualness, writing expands our sense of what is possible. Imaginable. Livable. Publishing women authors is not a minor component in this process.

(from https://pentransmissions.com/2018/05/...)

On its US publication, The Taiga Syndrome won the Shirley Jackson Novella Award (for outstanding achievement in the literature of psychological suspense, horror and the dark fantastic) - that the 2017 winner was Fever Dream gives some idea of the deliberately unsettling and disorientating nature of the narrative.

The novel opens:

That they had lived there, they told me. In that house, there. And they pointed it out with an apprehension that could easily be mistaken for respect or fear. Their fingers barely peeked out from the cuffs of their heavy black coats. The smell of ash under their arms. Dirty nails. Dry lips. Their eyes, having discreetly moved toward where they were pointing, quickly returned to their original position, gazing straight ahead. “What are you really looking for?”—they asked without daring to say so. And I, who didn’t exactly know, followed their steps like a shadow, back to the village over snow- covered trails.

The narrator is, in her words, an ex-detective - That it had been a long time since I investigated anything was not a lie. - but is persuaded to take on a new case. A man asks her to seek out his wife (my wife, my second wife. My first one died in an accident.) who has disappeared with her lover into the taiga. He fears she may have taiga syndrome:

It seems,’ he continued, almost whispering, ‘that certain inhabitants of the Taiga region begin to suffer terrible anxiety attacks and make suicidal attempts to escape.’ He fell silent. ‘Impossible to do when you’re surrounded by the same terrain for five thousand kilometers,’ he concluded with a sigh.  

And yet, at the same time, she sends him messages. As the ex-Detective notes, the woman seemed determined to be found. Like Hansel or Gretel, or both, she had sprinkled crumbs of words in every telegraph and post office they passed through.
...
‘So is she Hansel or Gretel’ I asked, truly curious, still staring at the images. 

‘Gretel, I suppose.’ The man hesitated, taken aback. 

‘Maybe she is the woodsman or the witch or the woman who wants to get rid of the children in order to eat,’ I said more to myself than to the man who had begun to smile, stupefied. 

‘This is not a fairy tale, detective.’ he said, interrupting me again. ‘This is a story about being in love.’

‘Or being out of love.’ I corrected him.

She sets off in pursuit of the couple, accompanied by a translator. As they proceed deeper into the taiga, rhey are shadowed by a wolf, with acknowledged echoes of Little Red Riding Hood, and a feral boy. Later the narrator finds herself watching a sex show by two 15cm tall homunculi, both apparently vomited up by the woman she seeks. Or at least that is what she reports to her client.

The story we are told is simultaneously viscerally real and oddly distanced - the latter resulting from the narrative device that the narrator is telling us, indirectly, about material she has prepared for her report (That as soon as they were outside the tent, the noises of the storm began - this I also would have included in the report.) and her herself hearing accounts of what has happened relayed via her translator.

The 'that' construction is used very effectively in this regard, as the author explains in this fascinating interview: https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/inte...

Ideally, this book always make you wonder: Who, with what purpose, from what distance, just told me that? What are the origins of this piece of information I’ve received or this experience I’ve been invited to undergo? That origin always remains two or three steps away, encouraging the reader to keep thinking about those two or three steps.
...
When I wrote this novel, I spent a lot of time thinking about how to present a constant filtering of information and of truth — and the “that” (or in Spanish “que”) as a subordinated conjunction seemed very useful. To open a sentence with “that,” for example, points to the existence of something preceding this sentence (something which usually remains absent in The Taiga Syndrome).

David Markson, by the way, tried something similar in Wittgenstein’s Mistress. He created entire paragraphs out of subordinated clauses, all on their own — as a tactic to incite the reader herself to imagine and to make decisions about what might have preceded a sentence. Throughout The Taiga Syndrome I wanted to create those kinds of spaces in which readers have a lot of leeway, on the one hand, and a lot of responsibility too, a lot of decisions to make.

Although the English reader in 2019 can't help but recall painful memories of Ducks Newburyport's ", the fact that". Fortunately the device here is used effectively and sparingly rather than monotonously and this book shows what a good author can do in 100 pages rather than 1000. If published in English this would, like Ducks N, been a Goldsmiths Prize contender and other links include the accidental echo of The Cemetery in Barnes's 'his wife, his second wife' and this novel being one of the top 10 favourites of 2019 judge Sjon (https://www.vulture.com/2019/02/icela...).

The novel also comes with a playlist - replicated on Youtube here (https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list...)

Sainkho Namtchylak's Ritual Virtuality is particularly evocative of the novel's unique atmosphere:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VRQsq...

Highly recommended - 4.5 stars (my only hesitation in giving 5 that I've given too many this year) and surely a strong International Booker Prize 2020 contender.

[Teresa · Rating 3 out of 5]

The atmospheric prose and fairytale recallings—a Hansel-and-Gretel (grownup, non-sibling) couple; the narrator as a sort of Little Red Riding Hood with a wolf at the door (and in the Taiga)—should’ve made this work for me, but as a whole it didn’t.

I was intrigued by ideas in the middle of chapters—there’s lots of space for thought—though I never felt captured from the end of one chapter to the next. And if I hadn’t been captivated by Tara Lynn Masih’s story of the Siberian Taiga, “Notes to THE WORLD,” in her collection How We Disappear: Novella & Stories, I’m not sure I would’ve been able to picture Garza’s Taiga.

[Blair · Rating 4 out of 5]

Was this a book I read or a dream I had? With echoes of Ice, Twin Peaks and several Grimm fairytales, The Taiga Syndrome feels like Martin MacInnes' Infinite Ground as rewritten by Carmen Maria Machado. It follows a woman, identified in the blurb (and only in the blurb) as 'the Ex-Detective', as she tries to track down a couple who have gone (deliberately?) missing in the Taiga. (The Taiga – always capitalised here – is Earth's largest biome, a coniferous forest that spans continents.) The narrator, accompanied by a translator, visits a strange village; she doesn't find what she is looking for. Scenes often seem to repeat or loop, with minor adjustments to the perspective. Everything is displaced.

Something like that, yes. An arrow plunged into the left shoulder. A hole. And suddenly that moment produced the window. And the window produced the spectator. And those three elements together made the romance real. The passion. Someone longed for a freedom that was really an infernal abyss. Someone placed hands, now motionless, on the window. Someone who wanted to escape but couldn't escape and could only watch.

The story is broken down into pieces of story and then into fragments of language. The Taiga Syndrome, in the end, is not so much a novel as a disassembling of the novel. The fact that it concludes with a suggested soundtrack only seems to emphasise this – it's like the essence of the story has now become something so ephemeral it can only be communicated through music. Accordingly, the book leaves you with little more than a vague, unsettling feeling of hauntedness, the characters seeming to fade out of existence.

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[Repellent Boy · Rating 3 out of 5]

3,5 - Bueno, creo que este es uno de los libros más raros que he leído este año. Tenía una aura de tensión todo el rato, pero a la vez me resultaba enormemente adictivo. Creo que el mejor adjetivo para definir esta pequeña novela es hipnótica. Cristina escribe de una manera que resulta completamente absorbente. Creo que en cuanto a estilos, es una de las autoras más interesante que he descubierto este año. Y vaya descubrimiento.

La historia gira en torno a una detective, que es solicitada por un hombre que ha sido abandonado. El trabajo consistirá en ir a buscar a la mujer de este que ha huído hacia el interior de la taiga. No tenía conciencia de lo que era una taiga hasta este libro, que al perecer es una especie de formación de bosques, pero lo interesante realmente son las leyendas que existen dentro de este tipo de formaciones. Leyendas de maldiciones y demonios. Y eso es lo que nos encontraremos en la trama. Muchas situaciones surrealistas, con poca y ninguna explicación. Pero que no te dejan a partar la vista ni un segundo.

Es difícil valorar un libro del que no estás seguro de haber entendido por completo. Pero, debo valorar, que aún así, cada página, cada párrafo y cada frase me han transportado por completo a la taiga, y como dije antes, casi de manera hipnótica. Releeré en algún momento este libro.

[S̶e̶a̶n̶ · Rating 4 out of 5]

What is between imagining a forest and living in a forest? What brings together the writing of a forest with the lived experience of a forest?

Speckled throughout with cryptic koan-like passages such as this one above, The Taiga Syndrome routinely subverts comprehension as its narrator recounts a missing persons investigation gone wrong in the blurred region known as the Taiga. Whereas Rivera Garza's novel The Iliac Crest can at least partly be decoded using the themes and narrative structures of Mexican short story writer Amparo Dávila, with whom that book is inextricably linked, the nature of this book is wholly obscured within its own dense hermetic web. It's the type of book that as soon as the final page turned, I immediately began flipping through the book again, first idly, then faster and more pointedly with ever-growing anxiety. The repeated recollections from shifting points in time, the possibly alternating first-person narration, the wolf, the nearly impenetrable forest...it all is still swirling in my head and will likely be there for days...a turgid flow of words glimpsed through a thick plastic window.

[Yücel · Rating 3 out of 5]

Çok enteresan, okurken sürekli Sadık Hidayet'in Kör Baykuş'u aklıma geldi..

[Marie-Therese · Rating 5 out of 5]

Elegant, oblique, and haunting, this is one of the loveliest, most effortlessly accomplished books I've read in a while.

[Marc · Rating 5 out of 5]

Enigmatic. Haunting. Confusing. Menacing. Slippery. Ruminative. Magnetic. Just a few words to describe this slim novel put out by the wonderful Dorothy Publishing. A down-on-her-luck investigator is hired to find a missing wife. The woman seems to have run off with a lover and disappeared into a peripheral region known as the Taiga. It's an area that’s almost subliminal (feral, disconnected, remote, dangerous; almost a separate language). Although reluctant to take on the case, seeing a kind of futility in it immediately, the investigator sets off on a hunt that explores the nature of love and language and desire. A philosophical inquiry charading as an investigation. A bread crumb trail of language turns into an indefinite journey for our main character.

As the investigator and her hired translator get closer to their prey, meaning and sanity begin to fray. Noise is added to the signal as language passes from language to language, speech to writing, notes to report... A surreal menace tightens masterfully and mysteriously as the story unfolds.

“In fairy tales, the wolf is always ferocious. Astute and agile, the wolf always figures out how to get its way. … The Wolf, in other words, always wins.”

Eventually, language is impotent. It cannot penetrate place/nature in this tale (neither literally nor figuratively).
----------------------
The final chapter (XXIII) is simply a musical playlist, which, thankfully, someone has already gone to the trouble of compiling for us on Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?
----------------------
BITS OF LANGUAGE STILL LEFT ROOTED IN CORPOREALITY
stylohyoid | digastric | sternocleidomastoid
----------------------
Asymptote Journal Interview with Garza (Oct. 2020)

[Stitching Ghost · Rating 5 out of 5]

What a fantastic read this one was. The characters were great. The writing style was so good and the story was weird, introspective and insightful, I loved everything about this novella.

[Fulya · Rating 3 out of 5]

Sadece 82 sayfa ama tam bir demir leblebi.
Öncelikle bu kitabı alt ettiği için çevirmen Banu Karakaş’ı tebrik ederim. Yazarın çok zorlayıcı bir dili, çok geniş bir imgelemi var. Hem tiksindim, hem çok sevdim, hem sürekli geri dönmek istedim kitaba hem üç beş sayfa okudum yoruldum.
Garza’nın dilimize çevrilen ilk kitabı, umarım son olmaz. Kesinlikle bu zorlayıcılığa rağmen kendisinden başka eserler okumak isterim.
Son derece sembolik, son derece karanlık, son derece ilginç, hem gerçek hem kurgunun birbirinin içinde adeta bulamaç haline geldiği, bittiğinde de kafada beton gibi bir ağırlık bırakan bir öykü. Neye uğradığımı şaşırdım.

[Gumble's Yard - Golden Reviewer · Rating 3 out of 5]

My new method was to recount a series of events without disregarding insanity or doubt. This form of writing wasn’t about telling things how they were or how they could be, or could have been; it was about how they still vibrate, right now, in the imagination.

And Other Stories is a small UK publisher which “publishes some of the best in contemporary writing, including many translations” and aims “to push people’s reading limits and help them discover authors of adventurous and inspiring writing”. They are set up as a not-for-profit Community Interest Company and operate on a subscriber model – with subscribers (of which they now have around 1000 in 40 countries) committing in advance to enable the publication of future books.

Famously and admirably, And Other Stories were the only publisher to respond to Kamilia Shamsie (subsequent winner of the 2018 Women’s Prize)’s 2016 challenge to only publish books by women in 2018 (https://www.theguardian.com/books/201...) and this book is by one of the author’s mentioned in that article (her “The Iliac Crest being published in 2018).

Interestingly this publication process finds some echoes in the text. The third-party narrator of the book is an ex-detective turned fiction writer (after too frequent a dispiriting failure to resolve the cases which she accepts) whose technique is set out at the start of my review (and serves as an excellent description of the novel we are actually reading) – and whose route to publication is described as:

When I finished my manuscript, I sent it out to a small but prestigious press that published novels of a similar style.

The ex-detective is approached at a party by a man whose second wife has run-off with another man – but who seems to be leaving breadcrumbs of her escape route via telegrams and letters “like Hansel and Gretel” and that fairy tale theme is repeated both explicitly (with discussion of the darker origin of escape tales like that one and “Little Red Riding Hood”) and implicitly via the style of the book.

The ex-detective follows the trail of the couple to the edges of the Taiga (which appears their final destination) and a primitive village, surrounded by lumberjack camps and associated camp follower detritus.

There via a translator (this novel itself being jointly translated by Suzanne Jill Levine and Aviva Kana) she attempts to understand more of the couple – their stories being mixed up with the presence of a “ferocious wolf” and “feral child” and with increasingly bizarre and unpleasant episodes – albeit the translator is never clear if the events were real or imagined and whether he has understood them, the ex-detective cannot be clear of the accuracy or even honesty of the translation and we are similarly unclear of the fidelity of the ex-detective’s account – particularly given her manifesto for her novel writing (see opening quote of my review).

And this uncertainty and sense of distance is amplified by the distinctly indirect style. This is particularly due to the device of opening chapters with indirect and subordinated descriptions starting with “That …”, often tied with references to how the ex-detective may describe the events in her eventual report to the man who employed her (references which become increasingly conditional on whether the report will even be written). For example:

“That the mission, seeming so simple at the beginning, had become complicated is what I would write in my report for the man who was waiting for news on the other side of the ocean”

“That as soon as they were outside the tent, the noises of the storm began – this I would also have included in the report”

The man and woman have ended on the Taiga and the book’s title reflects the condition suffered by

“certain inhabitants of the taiga [who] begin to suffer terrible anxiety attacks and make suicidal attempts to escape ….. Impossible to do when you’re surrounded by the same terrain for five thousand kilometers”.

The same condition starts to impact the ex-detective who on her third night “already wanted to leave”.

I must admit there were times when I was desperate to escape the book – particularly in the middle parts (there is a particular low point featuring two homunculi – low both for how they appeared and what she sees them do) – however unlike the Taiga the book is varied and short, so I never felt trapped.

And as for the plot

I assumed that I hadn’t understood. And I assumed that it didn’t really matter.

Overall a worthwhile read although for a much stronger literary fairy tale take on Hansel and Gretel I would instead recommend Daisy Johnson’s Everything Under

[Oleksandr Zholud · Rating 2 out of 5]

This is a weird novella by a Mexican author. I read is as a part of monthly reading for January 2021 at Speculative Fiction in Translation group.

This is a non-linear story that sometimes reminds a writing of an unhinged person. On a surface it is a travelog plus mystery: a former woman detective, who now works as an author of mystery novels is approached by an assertive man, who asks her to find his wife. His wife ran from him with another man and he is sure that she got ‘a taiga syndrome’ and actually wants to return to him. As a proof he shows a lot of correspondence from her, including telegrams (it is roughly our times, so ‘grams are unusual).

Taiga syndrome is a psychological disorder: “It seems,” he continued, almost whispering, “that certain inhabitants of the taiga begin to suffer terrible anxiety attacks and make suicidal attempts to escape.”… “Impossible to do when you’re surrounded by the same terrain for five thousand kilometers,”

So, a couple attempts to escape our world and the narrator follows their bread crumbs – the story tries to find roots of famous fairy tales, Hansel and Gretel and Little Red Riding Hood seeing in them attempts of cannibalism by people we trust. She hires a translator, who helps her and they witness some strange things as well as hear multiple unbelievable stories.

It is an interesting mix, but sometimes to shifts to ‘picture for picture’s self’ i.e. there is no clear plot, no reliable narrator, but a lot of musings that stray away. I don’t enjoy such stories.

[Sara Uribe · Rating 5 out of 5]

El mal de la Taiga es uno de mis libros favoritos de Cristina Rivera Garza (a quién quiero engañar, todos sus libros son mis libros favoritos). Se trata de un caso de La Detective de los Tantos Fracasos, un personaje que aparece en otros de sus libros. Amo la búsqueda que la detective emprende en pos de la mujer del hombre que la contrata para irla a buscar a la taiga. Amo sus reiteradas afirmaciones y confirmaciones, como si todo estuviera puesto en tela de juicio y se requiriera una continua constatación de la realidad. Amo su excesiva corporeidad, su internarse sí, en un bosque, pero también en el cuerpo y sus funciones y su anatomía como una suerte de bosque. Amo sus capítulos tan breves, su noción del deseo, del amor y del desamor. Amo muy cabrón esta novela. Y ya.

[Joseph Schreiber · Rating 5 out of 5]

A strangely surreal take on the Latin American detective novel, Cristina Rivera Garza takes us to a distant land—or is it a state of mind?—creating in this short novella an enigmatic narrator whose company one will be loathe to leave. Like The Iliac Crest which was released in English last year, I don't care where Rivera Garza is taking me, I will willingly follow.
Expanded review can be found here: https://roughghosts.com/2018/12/09/it...

[A. Raca · Rating 4 out of 5]

"Aslında hiç kimse bir kişinin evini neden terk ettiğini bilmez, hatta gidenin kendisi bile ya da en çok da gidenin kendisi bilmez."


Pek de başarılı olmayan bir dedektif bir kadını aramak için tayga ormanlarına gidiyor. Hayalle gerçek arasında bu yolculuk serüvenini okuyoruz. İpucu bırakan bulunmak mı istiyordur yoksa kaybolmak mı?
Siz de ormanların arasında kayboluyorsunuz. Kitap boyunca alternatif masallar sunuyor, hikayeler anlatıyor size.

"Aşkın sona ermesi bile günün birinde sona eriyor.'

[Bill Hsu · Rating 4 out of 5]

I can't add to Nate's review. But maybe a quote:

I promised him I would, without taking my eyes off his Adam's apple that rapidly rose and fell. I promised him I would, while my hand, of its own accord, reached out to caress the hint of a beard on his chin, then his left cheek. What's true is that it was a very dark night.

Heh.

[G L · Rating 4 out of 5]

This might be the most challenging book I’ve read so far this year, but it’s also among the most enjoyable. The writing is gorgeous, and the author’s use of motifs from fairy tales—particularly Hansel and Gretel, Little Red Riding Hood, and a castle that evokes both Rapunzel and Sleeping Beauty—tantalizes and intrigues, even though in the end I feel like meaning eluded me.

On the surface a detective story, by the end I suspected that there were layers that I could only dimly perceive. “Perceive” is too definite; perhaps “feel” is a better word. The most superficial level compares the detective’s task to Hansel and Gretel’s attempt to find their way out of the woods by following the crumbs they left behind. Alternatively, one might see the act of reading this and trying to construe its meaning as a way of enacting Hansel and Gretel’s trek. But there’s clearly more going on.

As it happens, I’ve started reading the recently translated Death Takes Me, so I was browsing the discussion thread for that in the GR group Newest Literary Fiction. I noticed several comments suggesting that The Taiga Syndrome made more sense to several readers after they read that earlier (though more recently translated) novel. Perhaps after I finish Death Takes Me I’ll come back to this.

[Rosamund Taylor · Rating 1 out of 5]

Am I the wrong reader for this book, or is it just bad? It was written, published, then translated into English by two people: that's a lot of gateways for a book to get through before it made its way to me, so I imagine a lot of people must have seen something worthwhile in it. I don't understand it. The nameless female main character sets out on an impossible quest to find a woman who has chose to leave her husband and run away with another man deep into the Taiga, a huge coniferous forest. The story is told elliptically, with much left out: a sense of unease is established, but little about character or person. As the story progresses, we seem to understand less and less of what is going on. All conversation are had through the characters' second or third languages. No one ever answers a question. The writing is strange: repeating stock phrases ("Above all, I remember..." for example) and making repeated but obscure references to certain fairytales (Hansel and Gretel, Little Red Riding Hood) and full of sentence fragments or half-finished sentences. The author clearly wants it to feel incomplete and unfinished -- but WHY? I don't understand the story or why she's refusing to tell the reader at least half of it.

[Lukasz · Rating 3 out of 5]

A surrealistic novella about an Ex-Detective who searches for a couple who has fled to the far reaches of the earth. It plays with the language and the storytelling structure. An interesting read.

[James · Rating 3 out of 5]

Strange, intriguing, carnal--frequently beautiful sentence by sentence, but not quite cohering for me.
I reconstructed the author's playlist for the book here: https://open.spotify.com/playlist/4MZ...

[Paul Dembina · Rating 4 out of 5]

Not quite sure what to make of this one, but enjoyed it. I liked the off kilter feel, of a reality much like ours but somehow slightly different. Reminded me of Renee Gladman's Ravickian series in that respect

[〰️Beth〰️ · Rating 4 out of 5]

Definitely not your cozy mystery or detective procedural! This mystery keeps the reader off balance in a good way. A surreal mystery set in the tundra that incorporates Hansel and Gretel plus Little Red Riding Hood. Easy to read in one sitting but the intense, unsettling, wonderful writing will have you contemplating for some time.

[Jennifer · Rating 3 out of 5]

Mexican author Cristina Rivera Garza is known for her gendered experimental fiction and radicalism in Mexican literature. The Taiga Syndrome originally published in 2012 in Spanish has been translated to English and published by Dorothy Project (dorothyproject.com) out of St. Louis, MO in 2018. This is the second of her fictional works to be translated following on The Illiac Crest, originally published in 2002 in Spanish, that was published in English in the Spring of 2018 by a feminist NYU press. More of her works published in Spanish between 2003 and 2011 will most likely be translated and published in the future by English language presses. And this is really exciting!

The Taiga Syndrome is a classic noir detective story here with a female detective hired to look for a woman who left her husband and fled with another man into the taiga, an inhospitable geography comprised of melancholy and haunting obsession. The taiga is an undisclosed border region replete with women selling their bodies, crime, and the underbelly of society. Given that the author is from the Mexican border town of Matamoros which borders south Texas, I'd have to say this story might be related to the seedier side of life there. The storytelling also pulls from the medieval fairy tales of Hansel and Gretel and Little Red Riding Hood to use their darkest elements in new and fantastical imaginings.

The taiga creates a syndrome in people that causes them to go mad in that they desire to leave a place but are unable to do so. It is difficult to tell what is real and unreal, as there are dream-like sequences. Time is fragmentary. The writing style is poetic and sensory-based. There are repetitive and incomplete sentences together with richly poetic sentences. There is even a soundtrack at the end of the novel to evoke the multi-sensory aspects of the narration.

[Ed Erwin · Rating 2 out of 5]

Beautifully evocative in some sections, but I can't make much sense of the whole.

This short novella ends with a suggested playlist including the "Cantus Arcticus" by Rautavaara. That is a lovely concerto for birds and orchestra that I'd happily listen to again.

[Craig · Rating 3 out of 5]

Well, this was... interesting. The unnamed and unreliable narrator is a woman who calls herself a detective who accepts a case to track down another woman in a Taiga wilderness by the second woman's husband. There are a lot of fairy tale references. There are lot of weird and disturbing events and dark imagery. Unnamed detective woman and her translator companion witness a lot of strange things. Presumably, no one lives happily ever after. You know how when you go to the art museum and see paintings of vases of flowers and bowls of fruit and naked people you say to yourself, "Why, look, there's a picture of a bowl of fruit next to the one of the naked lady beside the bowl of flowers!" And then you go across the hall to the modern/impressionist section, and you see colorful shapes and lines and splotches, and you say, "My, that's interesting!" and maybe pretend that you know what it's supposed to be all about. This was kind of like the latter, the way some of the novellas Michael Moorcock published in New Worlds and that Damon Knight published in the latter volumes of Orbit left me, feeling a little bemused and unsure. It's an interesting thing, but I'm just not sure. On the other hand, this short novel won the Shirley Jackson Award for the best horror novella of 2019, so obviously there's probably a lot more to it that just went right over my head. It amuses me to note that the blurbs on the back cover seem to agree with my lack of certainty, saying in part, as they do: "...quietly poetic and narratively unhinged..."(David Borzutzky), "...does not respect what is expected of a writer, of a novel, of language..."(Yuri Herrera), and "An eerie, slippery gem of a book."(Kirkus). Recommended for appreciators of high-brow literary literature.

[Andy Weston · Rating 4 out of 5]

The protagonist and narrator, a detective / failed writer, accepts a case in which she is tasked to find a woman who left her husband and went with another man into a taiga, a scenario not out of place in a classic noir. Assumptions about geographical locations should not be made, and are part of the story’s blurry line between what is real and what is not. Intrigued? I certainly was, but don’t be for the wrong reasons. This isn’t a crime noir at all.

This is not a fairy tale, detectivre

the narator’s client says. But of course, it is; the taiga teemingly dense with wolves, and references to Hansel and Gretel, Little Red Riding Hood and L’Enfant Sauvage .
Rivera Garza has a sly inclination to be vague and to vex. Though she uses the haziness and the foggy ambiance of a noir, it’s the dark and eerie atmosphere created by the fairy tales that give the novella its identity.
This is a very powerful piece of work, admirably brought to English language readers by a new discovery for me, the Dorothy Project , which seeks to discover primarily women writers.

[Banu Yıldıran Genç · Rating 3 out of 5]

çok tekinsiz kuzeyde tayga ormanlarında kayıp bir çifti arayan dedektifin başına gelenler.
hayal gerçek iç içe. bazen iki kez okudum bölümleri. kafada çok garip imgelerle, eski masallarla o gergin ortamı çok iyi canlandırıyor.
taşranın garipliği ve oduncuların inanılmaz vahşetiyle bitiyor. dünyanın sonu mu gerçekten?
latin amerikalı yazarlar, acayipsiniz gerçekten.