by Kimmo Rosenthal
In the beginning of her poem Parodos, Nobel Laureate Louise Glück wrote
“I was born to a vocation/ to bear witness /to the great mysteries.” This is also the vocation of Cristina Rivera Garza, whose fiction is filled with great mysteries. Her novels The Iliac Crest and The Taiga Syndrome were strangely engrossing and compelling, albeit bemusing and unsettling.
Her latest novel, Death Takes Me, ostensibly a detective novel, is unlike any detective novel I have read. Many of those whom Rivera Garza calls “drowsy readers” will leave frustrated and disappointed. A serial killer is castrating male victims, turning upside down the usual trope of female victims in such novels. Among the characters are the Professor (interestingly named Cristina Rivera Garza), also the Detective, who has appeared in her earlier stories, and the killer with the nominative Traveler with the Emptied Glass (from an Alejandra Pizarnik poem). The writing of Pizarnik is central to both the crimes and the book itself as fragments from her poems are left by the bodies of the victims. In the midst of the book, Rivera Garza writes: “What is really happening? This the novel cannot know.” And, at times, neither can the reader which is one of its appeals to me.
The Detective, while describing the Case of the Castrated Men, is in fact describing the very book we are reading. “Full of psychological nooks and crannies. Of poetic shadows. Gender traps. Metaphors. Metonyms.” Chapters are at most a few pages in length narrated from shifting viewpoints, some dream-like, others surreal, the narrative replete with digressions, parentheses, suppositions, and revisions, engulfed in a swirl of feelings and images. There are multiple narrative themes at play, central of which is gendered violence. In Spanish, with its gendered nouns, the word “victima” is feminine. As the book unfolds the reader is confronted with the power dynamic inherent in human relationships, especially between men and women, and the unknowability of others and ourselves.
Rivera Garza hints at the complexity of her work in discussing Pizarnik in an essay penned by the Professor within the text itself. “Reading shouldn’t be so complicated. A matter of turning the page.” She also addresses her erstwhile readers challenging them. “Devoted readers, how do you read? What is it you read?” As a Devoted Reader, I choose to read the text in terms of its focus on the mysteries inherent in writing and its exploration of the possibilities of language. Its muse, Alejandra Pizarnik, described herself as “waiting for a world to be unearthed by language…each word says what it says – and beyond that, something more and something else.”
In her illuminating book Time and Sense on Proust, Julia Kristeva described Proust’s masterpiece “as targeting a polyphonic region of understanding at the limits of language.” This resonated with me as I wandered deeper into the brumous shadows of Death Watches Me, which takes place in the liminal spaces between reality and thought, the concrete and the abstract, the visible and the invisible. The interplay between the many themes and characters with their varied perspectives does create a polyphonic symphony of words, using language to try to draw the characters, and the Reader, towards the inner depths of consciousness obscured by the real world.
Language is not a handmaiden to the narrative, which remains unresolved. It is the very essence of the text. Words rush forth in the whirlwind of Rivera Garza’s prose, which at times thrums like an electric current, relentlessly gripping, giving the act of reading a dream-like quality. Consider the following description of the Detective slowly becoming unhinged, haunted by the case and by reading Pizarnik.
In an instant she hears everything, she sees everything, she smells everything, she touches everything. ….The air: wispy, thin, barely breathable. The light: so little, so scarce, so artificial. The truly yellow light. The light everyone calls electric, the sound, now of the electricity. That soft humming. That soft moan.
The introduction to Rivera Garza’s New and Selected Stories provides clues to understanding her. Describing her stories she says, “I had been close to something I could never fully grasp. That was enough I told myself; even more than enough.” Each new work of hers is an attempt to come closer. Her vision inheres in exploring language. The Writer and the Devoted Reader become imbricated in a web of words and Rivera Garza describes them as “unsuspecting accomplices, co-conspirators of sorts.” The text remains “faceless” until the Reader gives it a “face”, reminding me of Maurice Blanchot proclaiming that “the book needs a reader in order to assert itself.”
Rivera Garza says the Writer and Reader “may never agree….. but we will know that we have shared the unintelligible together. We are kin now. We will never be alone.” Yes, I do feel this kinship. She has reinforced my belief that the personal mythology of my own reading and writing is part of the search for what Pizarnik describes as “a phrase that is entirely yours”. I am still searching for that phrase and reading Death Takes Me provides another fingerpost along the journey.
References
Cristina Rivera Garza, Death Watches Me, Hogarth, 2025
—————————- New and Selected Stories, Dorothy (A Publishing Project), 2022
Alejandra Pizarnik, Extracting the Stone of Madness (Collected Poems 1962-1972), New Directions, 2016
Julia Kristeva, Time and Sense (Proust and the Experience of Literature), Columbia University Press, 2025
Kimmo Rosenthal, after a long career of teaching and publishing mathematics, has turned his attention to writing. He has over forty literary publications and a Pushcart Prize nomination. Recent work has appeared in Sage Cigarettes, The Fib Review, After the Art, BigCityLit, and The RavensPerch.
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