The Iliac Crest
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- $23.99
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- $23.99
Publisher Description
Surreal and gothic, The Iliac Crest is a masterful excavation of forgotten Mexican women writers, illustrating the myriad ways that gendered language can wield destructive power.
On a dark and stormy night, two mysterious women invade an unnamed narrator’s house, where they proceed to ruthlessly question their host’s identity. The women are strangely intimate―even inventing together an incomprehensible, fluid language―and harass the narrator by repeatedly claiming that they know his greatest secret: that he is, in fact, a woman. As the increasingly frantic protagonist fails to defend his supposed masculinity, he eventually finds himself in a sanatorium.
Published for the first time in English, this Gothic tale is “utterly weird yet deeply resonant in its portrayal of gendered violence” (The Millions). Through layered and haunting prose, Cristina Rivera Garza unravels the cultural and political histories of Mexico, probing at the misogyny that fuels the disappearance of women in literature and in real life.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
This astounding and thought-provoking novel from Rivera Garza (No One Will See Me Cry) opens during a stormy night: two women visit an unnamed narrator at his oceanside home and gradually unravel his life. The first woman, whom the narrator has never met before, shares the name of neglected Mexican author Amparo D vila. The second woman arrives shortly after and promptly faints it's the narrator's former partner, whom he refers to as the Betrayed. The narrator, who works at a hospital for terminal patients ("My life among the dead was boring, to be sure, but at least it had the merit of being routine"), becomes increasingly disturbed by the two women, who claim to know his secret. Amparo, meanwhile, says a patient at the narrator's hospital stole her manuscript, and she wants the narrator to retrieve it for her. This leads the narrator on a journey through his unnamed country (though it's clearly Mexico) that fractures his sense of reality and shifts his understanding of his own gender. Rivera Garza's novel succeeds as a suspenseful psychological horror story in the vein of a David Lynch film or Ingmar Bergman's Persona, as a dissolver of the space between genders, and as a challenge to the cultural erasure of the real-life D vila. The result is mind-bending.
