Cristina Rivera Garza: Disappearance and Unknowing

Taiga is a singular, bristling mass of conifers, stretching from the West Coast of Canada to the Eastern reaches of Siberia. Those who reside within suffer an affliction, one which causes anxiety, panic, and an inescapable desire to escape the seemingly infinite forest. One might imagine a nightmare, where unending spruce and fir swallow up the cries of a shrinking dreamer. The Taiga Syndrome, Cristina Rivera Garza’s dreamlike novel, is a gradual descent into such an idea. What begins as a search for a couple who have disappeared into the titular woods, bends and shifts into a tale reminiscent of The Brothers Grimm.

Disappearance runs throughout Rivera Garza’s fiction. In The Iliac Crest, a physician's home is invaded by a reborn Amparo Davila, setting off an infernal plunge into the dissolution of identity, where uncertainty effaces all attempts to flee. In Foreigner, an unnamed narrator recalls his mother, also nameless, who exists in his memory as a singular desire to leave. In fact, very few of Rivera Garza’s characters are given names; instead, they are referred to via designations, such as The Detective, or The Stranger. Yet within the story, that role is often called into question, if not entirely contradicted. It is this uncertainty which forms the crux of her work. One can only submit to unknowing.

In Liliana’s Invincible Summer, Rivera Garza herself is haunted by uncertainty. As she pours over old case files, on a summer day in Mexico City, she imagines Liliana, dancing, laying claim to her freedom. Liliana was killed by her ex-boyfriend on July 16th, 1990. He, like so many other men, was a part of a machine that perpetuates violence against women. Its existence is collectively denied, Liliana’s murder is labeled as nothing more than a crime of passion. Rivera Garza’s literature is a cry of rage against femicide, against a system complicit in the continued oppression of those who refuse to submit to its prescriptive categories. Liliana, and all the women who have disappeared from Mexico City, are like the dreamer in the woods, fading from view. We, much like Rivera Garza, can only hope to remember.

Cristina Rivera Garza will be speaking at JLF Houston, from September 6th 8th, 2024, and we could not be more excited.