An Unabashedly Intellectual Murder Mystery

Having recently found widespread recognition in the United States, one of Latin America’s greatest living authors has decided to challenge her newfound readers with a brilliant and bewildering novel about murder, castration, and the illegibility of poetry. Death Takes Me, by Cristina Rivera Garza, underscores the Mexican novelist’s intellectual depth as well as her formal playfulness, and confronts the way an environment rife with violence can shock citizens into numbness.

Rivera Garza teaches creative writing at the University of Houston and has lived for decades in the United States, but until recently, only a handful of her more than 20 books had appeared in English. That began to change in 2023, when she published her own translation of the work that would earn her a Pulitzer Prize, Liliana’s Invincible Summer, a fiercely political memoir about the life and death of her younger sister, who was murdered at age 20 by an on-and-off boyfriend.

The critical consensus in the Spanish-speaking world is that Death Takes Me, which was originally published in 2008, is among Rivera Garza’s best books—a sophisticated answer to Roberto Bolaño’s 2666 that elaborates on the Chilean novelist’s blend of gruesome violence and literary puzzles from a feminist perspective. Whereas Liliana’s Invincible Summer is emotional, sincere, and relatively easy to follow, Death Takes Me is cerebral, fragmentary, and disorienting. Translated by Robin Myers and Sarah Booker, the novel is ostensibly about a series of murders of young men in an unnamed Mexican city, but it often seems more concerned with the study of poetry and psychoanalytic theory than with detective work. At one point, Rivera Garza interrupts the narrative to reproduce a scholarly article that she may or may not have submitted to a real academic journal; at another, she inserts a number of experimental poems that she published under a pseudonym a year before releasing Death Takes Me. The book’s unabashed intellectualism is the product of Mexican literary culture, which tends to abide by the Cuban writer José Lezama Lima’s famous motto, “Difficulty is the only stimulant.”  

But readers willing to play by Rivera Garza’s rules can expect a reward commensurate with their efforts, the sort of anti-noir novel that a ghostwriting team comprising Jorge Luis Borges, Jacques Lacan, and Clarice Lispector might deliver in response to a publisher’s request for a true-crime number. Like the murders it recounts, Death Takes Me resists interpretation, inducing in the reader a disconcerting mixture of numbness and anxiety. Those familiar with Rivera Garza’s more recent work will soon realize that the book has another, more political dimension. Although it approaches the issue obliquely by reversing the gender of the victims, Death Takes Me is the author’s first sustained meditation on femicide—and perhaps a preliminary study for the memoir she would publish more than a decade later.

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In the novel’s opening scene, a literature professor by the name of Cristina Rivera Garza goes out for a jog and stumbles upon the castrated body of a young man. Yet in the weeks that follow, as she sits down for tense interviews with the female detective in charge of the case and dodges the obsessive pursuit of a suspicious woman who claims to be a tabloid journalist, the aspect of the crime scene that most preoccupies her isn’t the dead man but what she noticed on the wall of the alley where she found him. Using nail polish as ink, someone had scribbled a few lines by Alejandra Pizarnik, an Argentine writer who wrote cryptic poems and anxious diaries about language, sex, and death before dying by suicide in 1972 at the age of 36—and who is also the subject of the academic paper published within the novel. (The fictional Rivera Garza, we later learn, is affiliated with the same university where the author taught while she was writing the novel.)

The reader soon notices uncanny parallels between the professor’s work and the detective’s. It’s not a coincidence that the adjective nonsensical can apply to a gruesome murder just as well as to a work of avant-garde literature. Cops and critics are, in some ways, in the same business: that of interpretation. They pay close attention, notice details, find clues; they gather evidence and formulate theories; they make a case for their hypotheses. Their work is a search for meaning—an attempt to make sense of mysterious signs.

As the terrified residents of the city continue to stumble upon castrated bodies, there’s no question that the perpetrator of these murders is a serial killer: Poems by Pizarnik are found at each crime scene. That detail alone, the detective insinuates to the professor, is enough to mark her as the prime suspect.

The theory is soon put to rest, though, when Rivera Garza starts receiving strange messages from the killer, signed with the names of different female artists. The letters are full of clues that produce nothing: no leads, no real suspects—and no hope. The truth is that, in this city, catching the murderer won’t change much. “It’s been a long time since a man died,” the detective’s assistant observes about halfway through the novel. “So what?” the detective responds, in a tone that the narrator describes as listless and bitter. “Women and children die, too. Women and children and men are still dying, too.”       

Although the novel keeps the details of its setting ambiguous, it seems to take place in Toluca, an hour away from Mexico City—and the capital of one of the most violent states in the country. Hence, I think, the detective’s hopelessness: In a nation where the murder rate is five times higher than the United States’, her work is condemned to fail. The trope of numb despair as a response to unending horror is one of the hallmarks of 21st-century Mexican literature. Recent entries in this canon include Fernanda Melchor’s Hurricane Season and Clyo Mendoza's Fury, but the seminal example—if we understand that a writer’s nationality does not dictate what literary tradition they belong to—is undoubtedly 2666. That novel’s long list of forensic descriptions of murdered women in Mexico, which stretches for dozens of pages, seems meant to induce in the reader a feeling not unlike the listless bitterness of Rivera Garza’s detective.

The discussions of literary theory that fill the pages of Death Takes Me—besides Rivera Garza’s academic paper on Pizarnik, the novel features lengthy sections about the work of French psychoanalysts—serve a similar function to Bolaño’s appropriation of coroners’ dehumanizing language: They evoke detachment in the face of violence. But if this tactic is aesthetically effective and politically powerful, it’s because of the anxiety that courses beneath, in this city where even the detective knows that her work is pointless.

[Read: A novel that boldly rethinks the border]

The real Rivera Garza, however, seems unsatisfied with the hopelessness that haunts the pages of her own novel. Death Takes Me appears to have been a stepping stone to a more explicitly political confrontation with violence—one that refuses resignation and demands justice. Shortly after the Spanish edition of Liliana’s Invincible Summer was published in 2021, Rivera Garza declared in an interview with El País that “all of [her] previous books” had been preparations to finally “be able to write this one about [her] sister’s femicide.” That last word is important. Since 2012, Mexican law has considered that murders of women who are killed “for reasons related to their gender” constitute a different crime from other homicides. This much-belated change in language was meant to reflect the reality that, according to the United Nations, an average of 10 women are killed each day in Mexico.

The legal recognition of the specificity of gender violence was a hard-won victory for the Mexican feminist movement—a struggle that Rivera Garza documents in her memoir. But the subject was already on her mind in Death Takes Me. The difference here, of course, is that it’s men who must learn to live in a country where they can never feel safe:

It was no longer a personal fear by then, but paranoia. A cloud of dragonflies. A pod of lobsters. Frenetic destruction. Young men would seek, and eventually find, new ways to protect their genitals … Old men would speak of other, always better times, now gone. Before all of this was happening. Before, when a man was safe … The world, in the aftermath of Four Castrated Men, would be different as a result of being so very much, or exaggeratedly, the same world where the Detective would fail once again.

The passage makes a political point, of course, but the implausibility of its gender reversal is also very funny; readers recognize just how common the inverse scenario is. Here lies the greatest success of Death Takes Me: For all the numbness and the horror and the cerebral discussions of poetics, it’s also full of humor. It may well be that the novel’s most important contribution to our moment is that it consciously rejects the language of witnessing, elegy, and moral certainty on display in many contemporary stories about trauma. Death Takes Me, instead, suggests that personal grief and political anger can find expression, too, through ambiguity and irony—and even laughter.