In​ his essay ‘The Guilty Vicarage’, W.H. Auden wrote that the detective’s job is ‘to restore the state of grace in which the aesthetic and the ethical are as one’. Death Takes Me stands in opposition to this formula. Cristina Rivera Garza’s decision to challenge the neatness of the detective story has its roots in the murder in July 1990 of her sister, Liliana, the subject of her Pulitzer Prize-winning memoir, Liliana’s Invincible Summer (2023). For Rivera Garza, the murder is ‘a very complex puzzle that I will never quite finish putting together’.

The novel begins with the discovery of a body. The victim, a 28-year-old man, has not only been murdered but castrated. He is found by a writer and academic called Cristina Rivera Garza, a professor of literature at the Toluca campus of the Instituto Tecnológico y de Estudios Superiores de Monterrey, where the actual Rivera Garza was teaching when Death Takes Me was written (the novel came out in Mexico in 2007).

At first Rivera Garza is only a witness, but as castrated bodies pile up and it emerges that the killer is leaving lines of poetry at the site of each murder – in nail polish on a brick wall, in lipstick on the pavement, on a piece of paper clenched in a victim’s fist – she is enlisted by the police as a ‘literary consultant’. The quotations are from the work of Alejandra Pizarnik, an Argentine poet known throughout Latin America for her elliptical lyrics about madness and death. Pizarnik began publishing in 1955, when she was nineteen. In 1960, she moved to Paris, where she became friends with writers including Julio Cortázar and Octavio Paz, who wrote the foreword to her most celebrated collection, Diana’s Tree (1962). In 1972, she killed herself with an overdose of barbiturates.

The unnamed detective tasked with solving the murders in Death Takes Me becomes obsessed with Pizarnik, believing that her work holds the key to the case. It certainly provides the key to the novel, or to understanding why reading it is such a joyless and baffling experience. Rivera Garza describes Pizarnik as a frustrated novelist whose prose writing lies far from ‘the linearity that is generally associated with fiction and beyond the field of influence of the plot’. She might be talking about Death Takes Me when she says that Pizarnik ‘frequently snips the threads of meaning in language by using fragmented lines or paragraphs. The structure that connects these textual particles responds more to the spatial juxtapositions of a collage than to the temporal or logical series of events in a story.’

If the prose sounds academic here, that’s because halfway through Death Takes Me an essay by Rivera Garza on Pizarnik’s work, ‘submitted for review by the journal Hispamérica’, is reproduced in full. The academic jargon is less confusing than the novel’s convolutions of structure and plot. Here, for instance, are Rivera Garza and the detective discussing the case in a restaurant:

‘Transnominations,’ I murmured, settling into those words that weren’t hers but mine. Feeling like an impostor of myself, I ordered a bottle of water from a busy waiter.

The Detective pulled some copies from her black briefcase. These partially wrinkled pages were printed with ‘On This Night in This World’, the Pizarnik poem that was published, as she informed me just then, in the Gaceta del Fondo de Cultura in July 1972. The Detective placed the pages on the table. Pointing at the underlined passage, she asked: ‘So every poem fails?’

She was asking as if I were wondering the same thing. She asked with the kind of knowledge forged in strange and uncomfortable coincidences around a glass of water or a belt where countless suitcases circulate as if part of the same eternity. She asked with my words. This is a Great Kingdom that is missing a queen or a king. And I, for a moment, for just a second, believed we were understanding each other.

The novel’s sections cycle through the main characters. First, Rivera Garza as first-person narrator, from her discovery of the body through to her uneasy relationship with the detective (‘a woman with opaque eyes and huge hands’), conversations with her lover and meetings with a tabloid journalist who wants to write a book about the case. Rivera Garza thinks about historical castrates, from the Han dynasty historian Sima Qian and the medieval philosopher Peter Abelard to Alessandro Moreschi, the last castrato. The section ends with a letter arriving under her door, apparently written by the killer. Eleven more letters follow, signed with the names of female performance artists: Gina Pane, Lynn Hershman and Joachima Abramović (which, without explanation, everyone takes to mean Marina Abramović). The letters suggest the killer has been watching both Rivera Garza and the detective. They also draw a parallel between literary analysis – and, for that matter, readers of crime novels – and murder: ‘Those who analyse, murder. I’m sure you knew that, Professor … We all kill.’

The narrative then turns to the detective, a recurring character in Rivera Garza’s novels and stories. She sleeps poorly in the ‘bachelor’s mess’ of her apartment, troubled by violent dreams of a shoot-out in which she killed a man. She goes to clubs, drinks, snorts a line of coke ‘with that half pleasure and half guilt that compels her back to the dance floor, to lose herself among the crowd’, flipping the identity of the typical chaotic male cop. She obsesses over the case:

She thinks about the dead men. One, Two, Three, Four … in order to work on their cases she needs to call them One, Two, Three, Four. That way they don’t make her want to vomit. That way she protects them. This is a veil. One, Two, Three, Four. That’s what she calls them when she sits down at the table and, instead of eating, thinks. She remembers. She classifies. She enumerates. She chews.

She considers the murdered: a journalist, a librarian, a translator and a teacher, all between the ages of 27 and 35, all men. It’s another inversion, a particularly pointed one in Mexico, which has one of the highest rates of femicide in the world. Rivera Garza wrote Death Takes Me in the shadow of the towering death count of women in Ciudad Juárez, of Roberto Bolaño’s 2666 and the growing popularity of narconovelas, TV shows that glamorise drug lords and generally treat women as victims or victims-in-waiting. A further addition to this gendered hall of mirrors is that, as Rivera Garza points out to the detective, ‘la víctima is always feminine,’ even if the bodies being sent to the morgue are male. ‘This word will castrate them over and over again.’

The detective studies the work of Marina Abramović, visits the victims’ friends and family, and on the way back from one interview parks outside her mother’s apartment and thinks about going inside. She knows she should, but ‘doesn’t want to see her sweet big eyes or feel her embrace or sit down at her table. Most of all, she doesn’t want to walk past the bulge of the man, legs spread, his arms wide across the couch, as he watches the television while he burps or indiscreetly scratches his testicles.’ Her father? Her mother’s boyfriend? Either way, she drives off. We meet her subordinate, Valerio, with whom she speculates about possible links between the victims and about what’s driving the killer. The discussion about motive is pursued more eagerly by Valerio than the detective, who ‘thinks serial killers’ minds are incredibly boring’. The detective and Valerio sleep together, or fantasise about it – it’s hard to tell, as is much of what does or doesn’t happen in the book. ‘What’s really happening: This the novel cannot know.’ A reasonable philosophical point, perhaps, though it’s hard not to feel resentful when even the simplest scene-setting – the detective’s office is ‘a basement quivering with the sound of uneven voices and the blank velocity of papers passed from hand to hand’ – requires decoding.

This abstruseness is present from the beginning, when Rivera Garza finds the first corpse:

‘That’s a body,’ I muttered to no one or to someone inside me or to nothing. I didn’t recognise the words at first. I said something. And what I said or believed I said was for no one or for nothing or it was for me, listening to myself from afar, from that deep inner place the air or light never reaches; where the murmur began, hostile and greedy, the rushed, voiceless breath.

Here, and throughout the novel, the writing moves beyond stream of consciousness to a breakdown of language. However much time we spend trying to work out its meaning, the text remains a maze without exits.

Another view of the detective, and the case, comes from Valerio. We learn that his boss, shunted into a ‘sarcophagus’ of a basement office, is now given only ‘two kinds of cases: everyday cases (petty drug dealing, for instance) and cases so outlandish or incomprehensible (the disappearance of a woman from China in a whirlwind, among others) that higher-ranking investigators had discreetly rejected them’. She’s not much good at solving them, ‘but she did write long reports full of questions and details that pleased the aesthetic sensibilities of the chief of the Department of Homicide Investigation.’ Valerio is attracted to the detective but also patronises her. ‘He thought the Detective was a woman with the hang-ups of a little girl. He imagined her, though he didn’t know why, as an incredible shrinking woman: someone or something he could keep … inside his jacket pocket.’ A line from Pizarnik’s work explains the image: ‘The urge to shrink myself down, sit in my hand,/and shower myself with kisses.’

Valerio’s sexism is ironised by the title of the next section: ‘Grildrig’. This was the name given to Gulliver by Glumdalclitch, a female giant of Brobdingnag. We are back with the detective, but, for unclear reasons, chunks of Swift’s novel are also reproduced, as are untranslated snatches of Lilliputian speech (‘Hekinah degul. Tolgo phonic. Borach mivola. Quinbus flestrin’). The detective is stunned when she sees a TV news report about the discovery of one victim’s penis in a glass jar on some wasteground. Not long after, Rivera Garza imagines Valerio as an old man with laboured breath, doing circuits of a park and remembering when one of the detective’s superiors announced to the press that the murderer had been apprehended: the man who found the glass jar confessed, an event that appears to have been foretold earlier in the book. Valerio is unaware of that. All he knows is that it isn’t true.

The penultimate section is a collection of poems by ‘Anne-Marie Bianco’, with a foreword by the editor of the small press Bonobos – a real press, with whom Rivera Garza (the real one) published a book of poems called Death Takes Me under the name Anne-Marie Bianco, a month after this novel’s original publication. In his foreword, the publisher describes receiving a package of poems sent to a house he had moved out of when he was thirteen. The collection, he says, is ‘obsessive’ in its exploration of Pizarnik’s work. A second note arrives to another address ‘I hadn’t lived in for many years’. (This might be a joke on Rivera Garza’s part. I’d like to think so.)

The poet, who is presumably the murderer, includes an address and suggests a meeting. The publisher goes to the designated hotel but Bianco doesn’t show. ‘My blunder,’ the publisher writes, ‘became overwhelmingly obvious. There I was, the head of a tiny regional press, awaiting a ghost in the lobby of a hotel milling with people who, like me, seemed lost, searching for something.’ But the book, which he nevertheless decides to publish, ‘exists in place of that meeting. It’s the faceless text that begins with the calm of a question, a riddle. You, the reader, if you so choose, can decide whether you want to construct that face and implicate yourself, if necessary, in that enigma.’

This line, arriving when it does, is something of a goad. If the plot summary given here possesses any coherence, it has only been arrived at by reading the book twice, then going back through it page by page to try to get its events straight. Despite the conventional set-up, Rivera Garza isn’t interested in fulfilling the murder mystery contract. When the detective tells Rivera Garza ‘you’re the prime suspect in this case,’ it’s a recognisable convention of the whodunnit: one of the central characters (Borges set a ‘discretional limit of six’) must eventually be unmasked as the killer. But Rivera Garza provides no such satisfactions because satisfaction is antithetical to her aims. Death Takes Me is a book designed to withhold the pleasures of the genre.

Rivera Garza is more interested in the insufficiencies of language than in catching a serial killer. The novel is peopled with writers: not only Rivera Garza, the tabloid journalist and Valerio, a number of whose reports we read, but also the detective, who is better at writing reports than solving crimes (in Rivera Garza’s The Taiga Syndrome, published in 2012, she has left the force to write true crime books). The victims are all people who work with words, as is the killer, whether these are messages slipped under doors, lines of poetry on walls and pavements, or collections sent to small presses. None of this writing leads anywhere, or at least not where anyone is trying to go. ‘The gibberish,’ Valerio thinks, reading the killer’s messages, ‘was coming faster and faster.’ Rivera Garza wants to tell the detective that ‘every poem is the inability of language to produce the presence in itself that, by simply being language, is all absence.’ A puzzle we will never finish putting together.

The central embodiment of this theme is Pizarnik, a poet who was unsure about the ability of poetry to compete with great prose works. ‘Think of Kafka, of Dostoevsky,’ she wrote in her diary in 1963. ‘What poet causes such trembling?’ Death Takes Me is a novel that wants to read as poetry and does, eventually, become a series of poems, which are sent to Rivera Garza in the novel’s short closing section. She is convinced their author is the tabloid journalist who interviewed her for the book about the case, but does that make her the killer? We don’t know; the novel denies us solution, catharsis and, for much of its length, comprehension. Yet this is what it must be like for Rivera Garza, to whom, I suspect, all crime novels are unjustifiably cosy, and no return to a state of grace is possible after the radical disturbance of murder.