When a professor named Cristina Rivera Garza stumbles upon the corpse of a man in a dark alley, she finds a stark warning scrawled on the brick wall beside the body, written in coral nail polish: 'Beware of me, my love / beware of the silent woman in the desert.' After reporting the crime to the police, the professor becomes the lead informant of the case, led by a detective with a newfound obsession with poetry and a long list of failures on her back. But what has the professor really seen? As more bodies of men are found across the city, the detective tries to decipher the meaning of the poems, and if they are facing a darker stream of violence spreading throughout the city.
Seamlessly translated ... This detective novel radically scrambles what we think of, and how we relate to, the genre ... Exceptional style ... Deeply rewarding ... The novel is dense and elliptical, a dreamscape with a powerful undertow ... [A] harrowing and labyrinthine masterpiece.
Unabashed intellectualism ... Readers willing to play by Rivera Garza’s rules can expect a reward commensurate with their efforts ... 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.
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 ... None of this writing leads anywhere, or at least not where anyone is trying to go ... 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.
