Cristina Rivera Garza

On a dark and stormy night, two mysterious women invade an unnamed narrator’s house, where they proceed to ruthlessly question their host’s gender and identity. The increasingly frantic protagonist fails to defend his supposed masculinity and eventually finds himself in a sanatorium. A Gothic tale of destabilized male-female binaries and subverted literary tropes, this is the book's first English publication.

The Iliac Crest

Angela Zeiler

While gray and low, the clouds let just enough of the sun's light filter through to leave a mercurial tint on the crests of the waves.

It was raining now, as had become an everyday occurrence. It rained with that tiring and frightening noise of regular things. It was raining outside and I felt miserable, curled into a fetal position inside myself.

"She spends almost all of her time at the hospital" - she hesitated a moment before gathering her strength - "with the General Director." I laughed not only because I had obviously misunderstood everything that had happened in my living room some days before, but fundamentally because betrayal seemed to pursue my ex-lover everywhere she went. Sometimes she was the victim, other times the perpetrator, but the woman I had once loved every Thursday of my life seemed destined to wage a war on loyalty in all its forms.

From the moment I walked into the ward, I noticed that, unlike its usual semidarkness, the room was pierced with light. The window was exceptionally clean. From afar the mercurial clarity it emitted gave the impression of a mirror.

When he arrived, I was impressed by his apparent state of health. I was afraid that it was a mental case, which were usually the longest and most difficult to endure. It was only a few days later that I came to understand his condition to be political. 

The lines about the sea in this book are amazing 🥰

I was almost melancholic, but instead I looked out to the sea, her nocturnal silence, her immense mass. [...] How many of them knew the ocean so intimately, savoring her without resentment, gradually learning not to fear her?

I became aware, perhaps like never before, that this community formed around a handful of failing souls was, in fact, disappeared. And disappeared were our voices, our smells, our desires. We lived, if you will, in the in-between. Or rather, we lived with one foot in the grave and the other on terrain that held only a remote resemblance to life.  

The ocean soothes me. Its massive presence makes me think, believe even, that the world is quite small. Dull. Insignificant. Without it, the weight of existence proves fatal to me.

The hospital was nothing more than a cemetery with open tombs. A strange sort of limbo where those with fatal wounds arrived and, nevertheless, could not die.

So many contradictions, but precisely for this reason so expressive 😮

Thanks to my work in the municipal hospital, I spent little time with her. I say thanks now, which would seem to indicate that I liked my work. The reality it quite the contrary. For years I had intensely despised the tall walls of that fortification, which some bureaucrat with a malevolent imagination had decided to place right on the edge of the sea, on one of the most beautiful points of the coast, where tall reefs with complicated, angular features gave refuge to seagulls and migrants, pelicans and outcasts. Whenever I walked through the main door, gradually entering that wasteland of nauseating smells and excessive screaming. Icouldn't do anything but hate myself.

And we say with utmost certainty that this is a lie. But we say it anyway, so as to save ourselves from shame and humiliation. [...] We hope that the woman believes it and that, upon doing so, leaves, satisfied, going anywhere else with her own horror in tow.

All of a sudden, without warning, autumn moved across the coast as if it were at home here. 

Nica Rhiana

You need the ocean for this: to stop believing in reality. To ask yourself impossible questions. To not know. To cease knowing. To become intoxicated by the smell. To close your eyes. To stop believing in reality.

Kai Hatcher

chateau

wow this book is so bizarre and disorienting (i love it!)

Lack coherence and cohesiveness, lots of filler incidents, some topics were built up throughout but ended up not quite resolved, and idk, i was tempted to give 2 stars but it's somehow a page turner (tho not a satisfying one), and i appreciate the experimental effort (tho felt like a brainstormy first draft).

faye

this book is def not for me :( a very difficult read! but i really liked the imagery in the book.

anarh

Risa C

It reads like less of a horror novel and more of an eerie, unsettlingly surreal exploration into how language and gender can inform and distort the self and how an entire identity can be deconstructed or, as it were, disappeared. I couldn't fully grasp all that the story wanted to convey due to a lot of factors: reading this in its entirety during a lecture I should have been listening to, being not All There throughout the whole experience, and not having the context of who Amparo Dávila was and the time this book was written in (the Translator's Note at the end is very useful). Still, the stream-of-consciousness style of writing and mysteries in the narrator's mind tug you along irresistibly, even if it doesn't always make sense on the first, second, or subsequent readings. I feel like this book would benefit from further re-readings, but I don't think I enjoyed it enough to put in the effort.

Desislava Milcheva

 I felt an ominous presence the whole time I was reading it. The writing is astonishing and full with emotion. The way the author described the protagonist's feelings towards the sea made me feel like I'm violating a boundary by reading about it. The story is a great example of how "you should not judge a book by it's cover".

I struggle with a true review of this book because an aspect of my experience reading it was that I was as confused and detached as the narrator on what was happening. It was like the narrator was also speaking a language I sometimes didn’t understand whether they were speaking in reality or manifesting things that simply didn’t exist. As the book progressed it was harder to distinguish the two. It is worth a reread in the future bc I find it already disappearing from my mind.

Laura

This novel made me uncomfortable, but not in a way that the book was meant to. Instead, it felt like author insert fanfiction, and I'm not even familiar with the author whose style Garza was trying to ape. Also, I'm not crazy about feminism writing, and didn't know it was a feminist novel until I actually opened it up. I'd recommend almost every other Latin American magical realism novel over this.

The Iliac Crest

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