Reviews

The Iliac Crest by Cristina Rivera Garza

Only show reviews with written explanations

chillcox15's review against another edition

4.0

A somewhat perplexing ghost story about gender and borders. I'll need to revisit this one another time or two in the future to figure out how I really feel about it.

sprklzrnbw's review against another edition

Go to review page

dark tense medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? No
Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.0

brikacey's review against another edition

Go to review page

3.0

Im so confused.

sylvass's review against another edition

Go to review page

dark emotional mysterious medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? No
Diverse cast of characters? N/A
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.0

ruxandra_grr's review against another edition

Go to review page

4.0

I'm not 100% sure what I just finished reading and I probably never will. I think it would be fascinating to read this in Spanish, even more intriguing, because Spanish is a gendered language, while English is not and I imagine that Cristina Rivera Garza played a lot with gendered forms of words.

So what is this book? Good question, Ruxandra. It's a surreal, off-kilter story about a man (?) in an obviously totalitarian society, he works in a hospital that just enforces the necropolitics of the state: he admits early on that this is where people are sent to die, and the people are undesirables (migrants, unemployed people, agitators). The hospital is located between North City and South City, in this liminal space by the ocean (that's relevant in a way I can't really put into words right now).

So the guy (?) is visited by a woman claiming to be Amparo Davila. Now, I didn't know this until the afterword, but Amparo Davila is a Mexican writer who Rivera Garza is in communication with in this strange, eerie, book of the uncanny. I plan to read her book of short stories [b:The Houseguest and Other Stories|38458438|The Houseguest and Other Stories|Amparo Dávila|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1519674579l/38458438._SY75_.jpg|60083396] because Davila seems to be an intriguing writer. It is relevant that in the book Amparo Davila talks of her disappearance when she isn't as well known as Julio Cortazar in our present (confirmed by Sarah Brooks, the translator, in her note at the end).

Then, an expected woman also shows up on the same night, The Betrayed, real name redacted, and Amparo Davila the visitor and The Betrayed bond immediately, leaving the narrator out and starting to speak in their own language (that language has a very prominent 'glu, glu' particle).

It's all very enigmatic and the atmosphere is foreboding. Amparo tells the narrator that she knows his (?) secret: that he is a woman. What follows is the doctor looking at all the women around him, trying to fit them into a gender essentialist view: oh, none of them actually seem that nurturing and empathetic, what is up with that?

The book explores the binaries and is intentionally ambiguous in that. There are no clean cut answers. While the state in the book has strict rules and policing, trying to fit things into categories, while presiding over them with (very misplaced) moral authority, hey, gender and sex are a bimodal distribution. The past informs the future. You may put checkpoints at the entrance of cities to keep the migrants out (people who travel from place to place, who have a shifting identity, right?) and then cordon off the undesirables, contain them in places like The Hospital, but the world, gender, 'the truth' will continue to be fluid. Glu, glu.

[Will probably read The Houseguest and Other Stories and then re-read this, because it seems like there are a lot of layers here that I haven't understood]