\u201cThat\u2019s a body.\u201d That\u2019s the reaction of professor Cristina Rivera Garza\u2014the main character of this novel, who shares her name with its author\u2014when she discovers the corpse of a man while on one of her customary runs. The man is missing his penis, the victim of a mutilation; \u201ca terrible thing against the dead,\u201d Cristina says, referencing \u201cGreat Deeds Against the Dead,\u201d a sculpture by Jake and Dinos Chapman, itself based on an etching by Francisco Goya. Cristina reports the body to the police, and the case is assigned to an officer, \u201cthe Detective,\u201d who is interested in a clue left at the scene of the crime: four lines from a poem by Argentine literary legend Alejandra Pizarnik. Over the following days, three more bodies are found, all with their genitals removed. As the Detective works to solve the case, Cristina receives a series of cryptic messages from the murderer, who tells her, \u201cYou shouldn\u2019t be afraid of me. I won\u2019t hurt you. I couldn\u2019t possibly hurt you.\u201d There\u2019s also the Detective\u2019s assistant, Valerio, and a tabloid journalist, both of whom are fascinated with the case. Much of the novel is given to various philosophical musings on gender and art, and the text is interspersed with occasional verse. It\u2019s a fairly audacious literary experiment with shades of Roberto Bola\u00f1o, but it never really comes together\u2014the narrative trickery is frustrating, and while Rivera Garza is clearly a more than talented author, the effect is ponderous. For a novel with a blood-soaked premise, this one is oddly bloodless.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
\u201cThat\u2019s a body.\u201d That\u2019s the reaction of professor Cristina Rivera Garza\u2014the main character of this novel, who shares her name with its author\u2014when she discovers the corpse of a man while on one of her customary runs. The man is missing his penis, the victim of a mutilation; \u201ca terrible thing against the dead,\u201d Cristina […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":2099,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2098","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-interesting"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2098"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2098"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2098\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/2099"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2098"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2098"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2098"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}