Death Takes Me
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Book Overview
From the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Liliana's Invincible Summer, a dreamlike, genre-defying novel about a professor and detective seeking justice in a world suffused with gendered violence.
"Deeply rewarding . . . a dreamscape with a powerful undertow . . . a] harrowing and labyrinthine masterpiece."--Katie Kitamura, The New York Times (Editors' Choice) A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR: The New York Times Book Review, The New Yorker, Esquire, Marie Claire, Denver Public Library
A city is always a cemetery. A professor named Cristina Rivera Garza stumbles upon the corpse of a mutilated man in a dark alley and reports it to the police. When shown a crime scene photo, she finds a stark warning written in tiny print with coral nail polish on the brick wall beside the body: "Beware of me, my love / beware of the silent woman in the desert." The professor becomes the first informant on the case, which is led by a detective newly obsessed with poetry and trailed by a long list of failures. But what has the professor really seen? As the bodies of more castrated men are found alongside lines of verse, the detective tries to decipher the meaning of the poems to put a stop to the violence spreading throughout the city. Originally written in Spanish, where the word "victim" is always feminine, Death Takes Me is a thrilling masterpiece of literary fiction that flips the traditional crime narrative of gendered violence on its head. As sharp as the cuts on the bodies of the victims, it unfolds with the charged logic of a dream, moving from the police station to the professor's classroom and through the slippery worlds of Latin American poetry and art in an imaginative exploration of the unstable terrains of desire and sexuality.
"Deeply rewarding . . . a dreamscape with a powerful undertow . . . a] harrowing and labyrinthine masterpiece."--Katie Kitamura, The New York Times (Editors' Choice) A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR: The New York Times Book Review, The New Yorker, Esquire, Marie Claire, Denver Public Library
A city is always a cemetery. A professor named Cristina Rivera Garza stumbles upon the corpse of a mutilated man in a dark alley and reports it to the police. When shown a crime scene photo, she finds a stark warning written in tiny print with coral nail polish on the brick wall beside the body: "Beware of me, my love / beware of the silent woman in the desert." The professor becomes the first informant on the case, which is led by a detective newly obsessed with poetry and trailed by a long list of failures. But what has the professor really seen? As the bodies of more castrated men are found alongside lines of verse, the detective tries to decipher the meaning of the poems to put a stop to the violence spreading throughout the city. Originally written in Spanish, where the word "victim" is always feminine, Death Takes Me is a thrilling masterpiece of literary fiction that flips the traditional crime narrative of gendered violence on its head. As sharp as the cuts on the bodies of the victims, it unfolds with the charged logic of a dream, moving from the police station to the professor's classroom and through the slippery worlds of Latin American poetry and art in an imaginative exploration of the unstable terrains of desire and sexuality.
Format:Hardcover
Language:English
ISBN:0593737008
ISBN13:9780593737002
Release Date:February 2025
Publisher:Hogarth Press
Length:320 Pages
Weight:0.90 lbs.
Dimensions:1.1" x 5.9" x 8.4"
Customer Reviews
1 rating
A Book That Missed The Mark
Published by Turbulent.Skies , 23 days ago
I saw this book at my local public library, and it was heralded as an award winner. This book missed the mark for me. As a true-crime and murder-mystery fan, I felt the author's poems overshadowed the story, and the flow just didn't work. It just felt choppy. I'm not saying this book doesn't have a following with articulate, poetic readers, but in a general book club setting, this can be easily passed over. This type of story just felt overdone.
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