Death Takes Me
A Novel
-
- $16.99
Publisher Description
From the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Liliana's Invincible Summer, a dreamlike, genre-defying novel about a professor and detective seeking justice in a world suffused with gendered violence.
“Deeply rewarding . . . a dreamscape with a powerful undertow . . . [a] harrowing and labyrinthine masterpiece.”—Katie Kitamura, The New York Times (Editors’ Choice)
A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR: The New York Times Book Review, The New Yorker, Esquire, Marie Claire, Denver Public Library
A city is always a cemetery.
A professor named Cristina Rivera Garza stumbles upon the corpse of a mutilated man in a dark alley and reports it to the police. When shown a crime scene photo, she finds a stark warning written in tiny print with coral nail polish on the brick wall beside the body: “Beware of me, my love / beware of the silent woman in the desert.”
The professor becomes the first informant on the case, which is led by a detective newly obsessed with poetry and trailed by a long list of failures. But what has the professor really seen? As the bodies of more castrated men are found alongside lines of verse, the detective tries to decipher the meaning of the poems to put a stop to the violence spreading throughout the city.
Originally written in Spanish, where the word “victim” is always feminine, Death Takes Me is a thrilling masterpiece of literary fiction that flips the traditional crime narrative of gendered violence on its head. As sharp as the cuts on the bodies of the victims, it unfolds with the charged logic of a dream, moving from the police station to the professor’s classroom and through the slippery worlds of Latin American poetry and art in an imaginative exploration of the unstable terrains of desire and sexuality.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
A poetry-obsessed serial killer mutilates men in this unforgettable literary puzzle from Rivera Garza, who won the Pulitzer for her memoir, Liliana's Invincible Summer. After a Mexican literature professor named Cristina Rivera Garza stumbles upon a castrated dead man while out jogging one night in her unnamed city, a police officer referred to only as the Detective investigates. Three more victims are found around the city—all with their genitals cut off. In each case, the killer leaves behind cryptic lines from the Argentine poet Alejandra Pizarnik, who died by suicide in 1972. The Detective and her assistant, Valerio, interview relatives of the victims and enlist Cristina's help in decoding Pizarnik's dark, fragmented poetry ("It's true, death takes me in the throes of sex"). Meanwhile, a reporter referred to as the Tabloid Journalist investigates the crimes on her own, and the plot thickens when the killer sends Cristina enigmatic letters written in Pizarnik's voice. Told in 97 brief chapters, the novel brilliantly melds the grit and pacing of a police procedural with literary theory, interweaving the investigation, Cristina's scholarship on Pizarnik, the killer's letters to Cristina, and a poetry manuscript by the killer entitled "Death Takes Me." It's all seamlessly conveyed in Rivera Garza's incisive and poetic style. Life and literature become one in this singular achievement.
