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A review by erboe501
The Iliac Crest by Cristina Rivera Garza
5.0
This slim novel made me want to return to grad school, for an opportunity to discuss with others and write an essay to unpack everything. Because there is a lot in this book to unpack about gender and language and identity, and how they interact.
Borders are a theme in the novel, as in the writer's life living on the Mexico-US border. Dichotomies too: North and South Cities, the coast and inland, true and false, those who belong and those who don't. You at first think another important dichotomy would be between male and female. But there are not just two fixed points in tension when it comes to gender in this novel. Male, female, tree, female hiding as male but also a tree. This complicates definitions of identity. This is a world in which men are in institutional power; women fear for their bodily safety and acknowledgement of their existence. But the women in this book also have the power of knowledge, and so invoke fear in the men. The narrator tries to understand and categorize those he interacts with by thinking of them as the Betrayed, the False One, the True One, the Seducer. These absolutes do not hold, however.
I found especially appealing an idea put forth by the Emissaries of Amparo Davila. These women are on a hunt for Davila's manuscript, determined to keep her work in the world, because her words give voice to their experience. Her written word validates them, and so makes them truly alive, as opposed to ignored and disappeared. Language and story has the power to characterize or construct a person, and on the flipside to annihilate.
Borders are a theme in the novel, as in the writer's life living on the Mexico-US border. Dichotomies too: North and South Cities, the coast and inland, true and false, those who belong and those who don't. You at first think another important dichotomy would be between male and female. But there are not just two fixed points in tension when it comes to gender in this novel. Male, female, tree, female hiding as male but also a tree. This complicates definitions of identity. This is a world in which men are in institutional power; women fear for their bodily safety and acknowledgement of their existence. But the women in this book also have the power of knowledge, and so invoke fear in the men. The narrator tries to understand and categorize those he interacts with by thinking of them as the Betrayed, the False One, the True One, the Seducer. These absolutes do not hold, however.
I found especially appealing an idea put forth by the Emissaries of Amparo Davila. These women are on a hunt for Davila's manuscript, determined to keep her work in the world, because her words give voice to their experience. Her written word validates them, and so makes them truly alive, as opposed to ignored and disappeared. Language and story has the power to characterize or construct a person, and on the flipside to annihilate.