The Iliac Crest

by Cristina Rivera Garza, Sarah Booker (Translator), Elena Poniatowska (Afterword)

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.

Genres: Horror, Fiction, Literary Fiction, Contemporary, Feminism, Queer, Gothic

136 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2002

About the author

Cristina Rivera Garza is the author of numerous works of fiction and non-fiction. Originally written in Spanish, these works have been translated into English, French, Italian, Portuguese, Korean, and more. Born in Mexico in 1964, she has lived in the United States since 1989. She is Distinguished Professor in Hispanic Studies and Director of Creative Writing at the University of Houston and was awarded the MacArthur “Genius” Grant in 2020.

Reviews

[Bella · Rating 4 out of 5]

actual rating: 3.5 stars

[David · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is a masterpiece of storytelling. The Iliac Crest is a surrealist tale by Mexican author Cristina Rivera Garza, translated by Sarah Booker and published by Feminist Press. I'm not sure if I'm capable of summarizing the plot, or whether it would even be helpful if I could, because the magic of the book works on the level of atmosphere and themes. The atmosphere is textbook gothic, using horror as a device to situate the reader but also to prepare them for what is to come. Rivera Garza intriguingly uses a first-person male protagonist, we think, a figure of some authority, whose understanding of the world gradually unravels after the unexpected visit of two women, one of whom we learn is Mexican writer Amparo Davila (unless she isn't). The book explores the transience of seemingly fixed polarities - male/female, north/south, true/false, past/present - as well as the limits of language and the stability of identity itself.

[Katarzyna Bartoszynska · Rating 5 out of 5]

If Kafka lived by the sea and got really interested in gender, he might write something like this.

Mesmerizing.

[Lea · Rating 4 out of 5]

"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."

In this eerie and haunting novel, Rivera Garza wrote an existential horror story.

"Nevertheless, as you can see, the horror filtered through them with surprising ease. It was the horror of freedom."

Described through a stream of consciousness, Rivera created a surrealist phantasmagorical world where the dividing lines of past, present, and future are erased. Moving fluidly, nothing is steadfast and rigid, and the borders between the inner and outer world, dreams and reality, male and female vanish through masterful usage of the fluidity function of language.

"Everything was a rough mirror of the Self."

The existential crisis is all-encompassing, and completely permeates the protagonist and his Lynchian nightmare. The language shapes and reshapes both reality and the Self and the only certain thing is uncertainty.

“No one really knows for sure why they do something, right?” She enunciated her words as if she had been practicing them for years. “You never really know why you begin, one day, indeed any day, this search for meaning, or why you cease doing it, do you?"

Rivera Garza immediately draws the reader’s attention to the significance of language in forming and absolving the existential crisis, most significantly in the narrator's continuous search for lost words, in the futile attempts to recall the name of the protruding bone in the hip. It is no coincidence that the word for the one bone most effectively used to distinguish a skeleton’s sex is absent for most of the novel. Language is crucial in the formation and definition of identity and in words, or in their absence, our preconceived form of Self could dissipate.

Verging on borders on death and insanity, with a lot of subversive and important commentary subtly put in beautiful lyrical language, this novel is well worth reader's time. It was the writer's reaction to the outbreak of femicides at the beginning of the twentieth century, and the to the disappearance of female bodies and the silencing of female voices. In The Iliac Crest, the light is shone on those whose beautiful and imaginative words might be forgotten or disappeared. But Rivera Garza is certainly not one of them. Gem of Mexican literature.

"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."

[Heba]

إنها أشد الروايات غرائبية قرأتها على الاطلاق ، مجنونة ، مربكة ، تقحمك فى لعبة متاهتها مما يصعب عليك انتزاع نفسك منها بسهولة...
رجل يترك امرأة مجهولة تدخل بيته ليلة يوم عاصف ومن ثم اذ بأمراة اخرى يعرفها تأتي هى الأخرى ..اطلق على الاولى " المزيفة " وعلى الثانية " المخدوعة" ..
تخيل معي الرعب الذي استولى عليه مع وجود المرأتين معاً ، بل واستخدامهما لغة خاصة يجهلها ، لقد رأى نفسه غريباً مقصياً في بيته ، كان ينقصه أن يستوقفاه ليطلبا منه الايجار قبل الدخول ...لم اتمالك نفسي من الضحك... 😄
وبالرغم من ذلك، فأمام عبثية الامر وغموضه كان يتوجب عليّ الشعور بالضيق ولكن يبدو إنني تذرعت بالضحك لإخفائه...
اما الرجل مسكين ، أصيب بهوس البحث عن الحقيقة ، يسير وراء هواجس وكوابيس مظلمة ...صراعاً مع نفسه وواقعه لا يتوقف ، ومع ذلك لن يفضي ذلك الى شيء ...
أنا نفسي لا اعرف هل توصل لشيء ؟ سوى انني تساءلت ماذا لو كان بنبرة واثقة وصوت ثابت قال لهما ببساطة " غادرا بيتي فوراً ولا مزيد من هذه الترهات والألاعيب ..هيا فوراً..." لكان هنالك نص آخر بانتظاري ، اليس كذلك؟...
اخيراً ملحوظة صغيرة : سيدتي الكريمة لا تستعيني بكلمة من القرآن الكريم لتأكيد تشبيهاً ما لا يليق بقدسية كتاب الله ، لقد افترضت حسن نيتك....شكراً جداً
يتغير شيء ما في الكون ، حين يتراجع شخص ما للوراء ، شيء لا يمكن تجنبه...

[S̶e̶a̶n̶ · Rating 5 out of 5]

A kind of literary kaleidoscope, The Iliac Crest rests uneasily in one's hands as it tilts and turns, looking behind then forward, traveling north then south and back again, always keeping one blue eye on the sea ahead, pelicans soaring against a grey limitless sky, reflecting itself over and over. Reading it gave me chills at times—similar to how I felt when I read Jane Unrue's Love Hotel, though the similarities between the two texts are only fleeting—the transitory effects of their ambiguities triggering an identical emotional response to a state of wavering balance on the narrow raised border between the known and the unknown. As a reader, though, that state is one of my favorites to be ushered into by a writer. It was helpful to read specific stories by Amparo Dávila prior to entering the labyrinth that Rivera Garza has meticulously mapped out here, for they form sections of the framework of what is a rather disorienting space in which to navigate. I will gladly follow Rivera Garza wherever she leads me at this point, and am much looking forward to reading her other two novels available in English.

'It was a very special manuscript,' she retorted. 'I'm sure that in it there were the codes of my memory, of my words. Of all my words.' It was difficult for her to talk now. 'I haven't written since then.'
'But I see you writing every day, Amparo,' I said, unable to avoid another burst of laughter.
'Oh no,' she said, 'that isn't writing.'
'Then what is it?'
'That is only remembering.'

[Irene (Irene’sLibros) · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.5
Did I just read an allegory? an existential crisis? social commentary on gender, identity, mortality, migration?
.
A ghost story told by a doctor OR the rantings of a patient in a sanatorium? 🤔
.
Narrated in a stream of consciousness I felt confused but also drawn in. This is an odd story, but the prose just suck you in and create such atmospheric instability. What’s happening? What’s real?
.
What I know for sure - everything in this bizzare world exists in juxtaposition often without clear distinction:
Land/ocean
Lucid/morphine
Alive/dead
Female/male
Free/militarized state
Real/imposter
.
Themes explored: gender, identity, sexuality, mortality, social programming, reality, betrayal, advocacy (women’s right/voice), freedom to travel, violence against women & immigrants, ambivalence
.
Highly recommend:
• for anyone that likes to read avant-garde
• challenging yourself to read outside of your comfort zone
• anyone seeking weird/creepy Latinx lit

[Teresa · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a fascinating, first-person-narrated exploration of the nature of (ir)reality, of insanity, of borders, of gender denial, of (private) language, of life-before-life--the memory of which could be a source of terror, or a longing to return to that state, or perhaps both.

Beautiful as it was to read, I know I didn’t grasp half of it. If I knew more of the Mexican writer Amparo Dávila (who is a character in this book), I’d perhaps have understood more. The theme of cultural erasure is prominent, and not just because the author notes it in a foreword. Though Dávila's first work was published in 1950, her first work to be translated into English will come out later this year. Perhaps that will help to counteract, at least a little bit, her disappearance.

[Jenny (Reading Envy) · Rating 4 out of 5]

I started this book a while ago and only recently came back to it, determined to finish it for Women in Translation month. I'm not sure I fully understand it or get everything the author was trying to do, but I somehow enjoyed that confusion.

A man is living on a bleak shore, working in a medical facility. On a dark and stormy night (oh yeah), a woman shows up at his door, and it isn't the woman he is expecting. She claims to be an author and that someone related to one of his early patients is disappearing her. His former lover, (known as "The Betrayed" throughout most of the novel), shows up later that evening, very sick. The stranger helps nurse her back to health and the two of them seem to gang up on him in various ways, and this is where I started to get confused. They develop a secret language, excluding him, and this seems like it should be a metaphor maybe. They tell him they know his secret, one that doesn't seem to be true, but maybe it is true? I have no idea.

The author the woman is claiming to be is a real person, someone the author wanted to write more about. But this is not historical fiction, it feels more like dystopia, but with a lot left unanswered. It is very atmospheric and dangerous.

If you make more sense of it than I did, please come back and talk to me about it.

[Antonomasia · Rating 3 out of 5]

Slippery, literary psychological horror. It addresses current topics: the revival of neglected female authors, and gender boundaries, but was first published in Mexico in 2002.

I'd recommend reading the translator's note first: it explains some important points and makes the narrative and its symbolism somewhat less opaque. I read it just under halfway through. Up till that point, merely looking up the writer Amparo Dávila (thank you to other reviews for indicating the character was named after a real person), and assuming that references to 'disappearance' related to political arrests in Latin American countries had left me frustrated. The disappearance is actually that of women authors and Dávila in particular - and the possibility of expression readers are robbed of at the same time - layered with the widespread murders of women in Mexico which would also become the subject of Roberto Bolaño's 2666. The title is a reference to the bones which most easily distinguish a female skeleton from male. Another character, Juan Escutia, is also named after a real person.

Understanding this background meant that I could enjoy the book to an extent from an analytical viewpoint, although the genre and atmosphere isn't one I like much in book form. (I wouldn't have read this novella if I weren't working through a few books eligible for next year's Booker International.) I noticed echoes of Hitchcock films combined with the paranoia engendered by living in a dictatorship - as in some other Latin American, or Eastern Bloc literature and film - but many English-language readers have compared it with David Lynch. I didn't feel a Lynchian atmosphere, but the possibility that facets of the story are not amenable to clear and specific interpretations, and are instead simply eerie and dreamlike and things-in-themselves is very Lynchian. I still craved concrete interpretations of certain points (e.g. the symbolism of the character of the Seducer, and some of the last reactions of the False Amparo when the narrator says he is going to visit True Amparo) but I have not been able to find any so far in other reviews online. If it were a type of book I enjoyed in itself, and wanted to spend more time with, I would probably have spent longer trying to think of my own.

I was impressed by the skill of the translator in dealing with gender ambiguity in the narrative. The Spanish shows some other characters addressing the narrator - who often asserts his own maleness and masculinity - using feminine word forms, which English does not have, a significant linguistic drawback. Frequently, the narrator did not feel convincingly male: like a character an inexperienced woman writer had created by attaching a number of stereotypical chauvinist male behaviours and ideas to a stream of other inner thoughts that (in a way I couldn't quite pinpoint) sounded more likely to be from a woman. He sometimes described and analysed his own actions in ways that sounded a lot like women analysing a man; I thought a few times of the question "Is this a reverse?" (i.e. someone posting a dilemma in a forum as if they were one of the other people involved). Of course one cannot trust such impressions absolutely (and these days gender-based assumptions about narrative styles are discouraged), ergo ambiguity.

I thought that the three characters' talking to the narrator as if he were female could be seen as their assertion of equality: his with them and theirs with him. (He felt this habit to be an affront.) They were making the male female, as opposed to claiming male/masculine characteristics and words for themselves because of male as the default culturally and linguistically, and being more powerful (as they are perhaps implying he has been doing, and as women have done to get ahead in male-dominated spheres. This could be related to the late 20th-century shift from forms of feminism about women being or becoming more like men, to feminism about asserting femaleness in itself - although that may have been a very Global North current, of limited relevance to conditions in Mexico).

[A typo or error that stood out: a doctor, of all people, wouldn't be getting cellulite and cellulitis mixed up.]

As Dávila wrote psychological horror, The Iliac Crest presumably contains references to her stories (which I have not read), and to other Mexican literature I don't know. A couple of journal/blog reviews mention Julio Cortázar.

The ideal reader for this book probably enjoys psychological horror blended with highly literary writing, has a keen eye for feminist interpretations and theory, and a good knowledge of Latin American, in particular Mexican, literature. That isn't me.

The Iliac Crest reminds me, in its claustrophobic twisty-turny atmosphere, of some other books that were listed for the Booker International and its predecessor the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize (and which I didn't always want to read in full); I wouldn't be surprised if it were on the longlist next March.

[Alaíde Ventura · Rating 5 out of 5]

Tengo que leer más para entender mejor, pero mi asombro no va a retrocederse, es como el mar, solo se va a ir haciendo más profundo.

[almonds · Rating 2 out of 5]

I’ve never done crack but after reading this book I think I know what it feels like.

[Eric Anderson · Rating 5 out of 5]

“The Illiac Crest” describes the journey of a narrator whose fixed idea of the world gradually comes undone after being visited by two women; one who claims to be the Mexican writer Amparo Dávila and one who is an ex-lover ominously referred to as “the Betrayed”. The women take up residence in the narrator's house and develop a language of their own which the narrator is excluded from. It's a story which becomes increasingly surreal as the narrator who works as a doctor at a sanatorium investigates a former rebellious patient, seeks to uncover a lost manuscript and comes under suspicion by the facility's administration. At the same time the narrator visits a challenging older version of Amparo Dávila who claims the narrator really doesn't understand anything. Questions arise surrounding what makes an authentic identity in terms of gender, social standing, citizenship and political beliefs. When the young version of Dávila arrives at the house the narrator is drawn to the prominent bone of her pelvis and feels a mixture of desire and fear. The struggle to recall the name of this bone and acknowledge the truth lying beneath appearances becomes central to the story. This is such an intriguing book and I feel like it's going to take some time for its meaning to fully sink in.

Read my full review of The Iliac Crest by Cristina Rivera Garza (translated by Sarah Booker) on LonesomeReader

[Laura · Rating 5 out of 5]

I've flicked around with the editions of this because - although I bought a Kindle version I don't have the forward by Elena Poniatowska - I would have liked to read that. I have Poniatowska on my shelf, Women-Mexico - for her book Lilus Kikus and Other Stories.

So, yes, I enjoyed this - I know I like these puzzle reads - which are strongly reminiscent, for me at least of the South American - magical realism style that I first encountered with Isable Allende and Gabriel García Márquez. This one, however, by Rivera Garza brought to mind a long forgotten book by Algerian writer Kateb Yacine and his wonderful Nedjma, that I will have to re-read.

This book is clever, positioning us the reader, with its narrator the doctor -the male doctor, which we immediately understand from his reaction to his two visitors who arrive one stormy night. And then as I progressed through the book, I could see how many sentences especially from the enigmatic True One, supposedly the writer Amparo Dávila could so easily be reinterpreted to mean something else. She says, at one point - "I am dead, I have been dead a long time." Our narrator tends to take things very literally as we are to understand when he says he can smell the ocean for at least "18 to 25 minutes" after he has turned inland on a route this time to North City.

It's some time since I've read Borges but for sure his influence is there in Garza's enticingly solipsistic style - where nothing is quite how it seems. I do understand that this is a realistic interpretation of how many people do in fact live in countries and states controlled through violence. People who live in fear of their lives inevitably feel that anything could change - and again Garza captures that quality exactly when the doctor himself is subjected to an interrogation and stripped of his clothes and almost but not quite becomes one of the "patients" incarcerated in the Serene Sanitorium - the irony!

The Iliac Crest uses sex and desire as one of those entries to the subconscious, those strange passages that necessitate a change of perspective, or a steep learning curve required to deal with shocking truths - those moments in life where we realise that our essential self is no longer adequate. I particularly like this shift-shaping almost delirious torment of experience that our narrator experiences - for sure he needs shaking up - there is arrogance and assuredness in his initial stages in the book - the certainty of a person who has authority - someone who doesn't expect to be challenged. I think it strange also how easy it is to recognise the male stability; so universally denied to women. It's easy for me to understand this book and the agenda Garza has, but nicely done - unlike my recent reads of Claudio Piñero, for example, a writer also reacting against totalitarian control in her home country of Argentina - Garza's work is refined and delicate and a delight to read. She insinuates her message carefully in the superb coils of her language and writing.

Fabulous - read this folks. It's one to enjoy; it's not political. It is fabulously sexy and smouldering and bewildering also. I didn't bother with the translator's note - she's a PhD student in North Carolina, academic blurb which Garza has so successfully elided.

[Maddie · Rating 3 out of 5]

I really really really wanted to like this more :(

[marta the book slayer · Rating 5 out of 5]

I am in a never ending loop of trying to decide whether this should be read before Amparo Dávila's work or after, and I fear I may never know the correct answer to this.

You may be asking yourself what Amparo has to do with this well...

This book is about our narrator who is visited by two women. One is the narrator's ex-gf. The other is the author Amparo herself! Both women know the narrator's secret and confront the narrator about it all the time.

Fuck me, this book is so fucking good. Please read it.

read as part of spooky season haunted tales that hopefully keep me up till the witching hour
🕸 picture of dorian gray
🕸 we have always lived in the castle
🕸 rules for vanishing
🕸 dracula
🕸 the iliac crest

[Nate D · Rating 3 out of 5]

As noted in all the accompanying copy (author's forward and two afterwords) this is a story about borders and boundaries, often in process of blurring. Which situate the present topical relevance of this noted Mexican author, but all that political conversation falls to the wayside before the much more elusive universe of the story itself. Transformation, the ocean, several interlopers, disappearance and reproduction. It feels a little unmoored at times, and perhaps has an over-reliance on the work of yet-untranslated writer Amparo Dávila, but the tone, repeating images, and unapproachable mysteries cast a singular spell.

[Callum McLaughlin · Rating 2 out of 5]

The Iliac Crest is the kind of book that is so singular in concept and approach that you’re either going to click with it, or you’re not. Sadly, in my case, it just wasn’t meant to be. Though I suspected from the off it was going to be hit or miss, I couldn’t resist giving it a go when I read the blurb and got a taste for the bizarre setup and fascinating themes that lay in wait. The book opens on a ‘dark and stormy night’, as all the best stories do, with two women arriving at the home of our unnamed narrator. One of these women claims to be a famous Mexican author searching for a missing manuscript, whilst the other is the homeowner’s former lover, known only as The Betrayed. They essentially move themselves in, quickly developing their own secret language, and repeatedly claiming that they know their reluctant host’s secret; that he is, in fact, a woman.

If it weren’t for the author’s note preceding the novel, and the translator’s note at the end, I do suspect a lot of the book’s highly allegorical meaning would have been lost on me. Even with them, I was left feeling at sea for much of my time with the book. Rivera Garza does not concern herself with telling a cohesive narrative, nor crafting characters that feel in any way real. Instead, she uses them as archetypes to explore her primary themes. They are, as I interpreted it, the way we use language to discern and divide the sexes, and the concept of borders – both real and imagined. Whilst there is undoubtedly huge potential in these ideas, I felt held at such a distance throughout that any impact was vague and muted at best.

For me, the book was at its strongest when the author commented on the toxic masculinity that can erupt when someone feels their ‘manhood’ has been called into question – a theme that feels all the more relevant in today’s world, and the reason why this book’s translation into English feels so timely. These moments of brilliance were fleeting, however, swallowed up by the novel’s otherwise alienating tangents and nonsensical goings on.

An interesting read, no doubt, but one that danced around its ideas so ambiguously that I was simply left wanting more – and not in the good way.

[daph pink ♡ · Rating 1 out of 5]

This is the first novel by Cristina Rivera that I've read, and I thought it was avant-garde.

With avant grade, we are aware that the text content can be scandalous or bizarre and that it can be challenging to find a satisfying conclusion. No criticism intended for the author; I loved how she tried experimenting with her texts. However, I don't believe I am the right reader for this book because of a number of issues I had with it on a personal level.

- despite its small length, it is not an easy novel to read because to its experimental texts that fluctuate in tone, narration, languages, locations, and events in a way that is very difficult to keep up with.

-secondly, I didn't appreciate how the plot was so open-ended that nothing could be said with certainty. I believed that practically all narrative points were not revealed.


- Additionally, the book's summary was either deceptive or I didn't understand its purpose. There were discussions concerning the narrator's gender, but they weren't sufficiently explored, and until the very end, it wasn't clear what they were attempting to indicate.

- the characters were also incredibly strange, which may only be due to the manner in which this narrative is written. I understand that the case may once again be made that it is avant-garde and that it is how things should be. However, unlike this novel, even in them the idea and the message are obvious and relatable.

- There were events in the book that happened completely out of the blue and had nothing to do with the theme; they were there, I think, to make the book look cool.

I actually stopped reading this book after a certain point and was just skimming it to get through it. I also find it hard to believe I read it all. My frustration was increased even further by the fact that I was aware of the name of that bone from the beginning.

[el · Rating 3 out of 5]

i love cristina rivera garza's prose and in a perfect world, this book would have been an ideal fit for me—i'd just recently finished amparo dávila's collection the houseguest so the late mexican writer's subject matter was fresh in my mind when i embarked on this. having said that.....i need to get better at reading weird, speculative, genre-defying work, especially the latin american strain. sometimes this book lost me but i appreciated the kooky concept and i feel like latin american writers in particular have this keen ability to cut through preconceived notions of novels/literature to create something you would never see an anglophone writer stand behind. this is that. amparo dávila, a real writer who represented a period of femicide/suffering emblematic of postcolonial mexican patriarchy, is a character in this slim book. i just love that. i didn't love the entire book, but that alone got me.

[Maria · Rating 2 out of 5]

Tengo sentimientos encontrados con esta novela. Me gusta cómo está escrita y como, sin ser muy consciente de ello, me ha hecho elucubrar sobre que papel tienen cada uno de los personajes, que representan y que quiere la autora que entendamos.

Mas allá de ese juego que te provoca el desconcierto de no creer estar entendiendo nada y sin embargo entrever cosas que si te gustan, no es una novela ¿fácil? Para empezar no recomendaría a nadie leerla sin informarse antes sobre quien es Amparo Dávila, uno de los personajes de la novela y a quien la autora claramente homenajea. La novela ya es por si sola intrincada como para perderse por este tema. Intrincada porque juega con un escenario inquietante en el que no sabes que papel juega cada personaje; personajes cuyo género, además, fluye dependiendo de la mirada de quien habita o conversa con este. Y porque se trata de un texto que con la metáfora por bandera que ¿podría clasificarse como distopía? Podría.

La sensación que me ha dejado es de desconcierto. Si la hubiera cogido en otra época del año, una en la que me encontrarse menos centrada o mas apurada, me habría sentido muy frustrada leyéndola o directamente la habría abandonado. No es para mi y eso es lo único que tengo claro.

[ana (ananascanread) · Rating 4 out of 5]

this book is like if kafka and a fever dream had a baby and named it gender crisis.

a mysterious woman shows up at a doctor’s house and suddenly his sense of self is gaslit into oblivion. reality, identity, masculinity, all unraveling in the most unsettling, brilliant way.

[Jennifer · Rating 4 out of 5]

A fiercely intelligent surreal, genre-bending, psychological mystery.

On a dark and stormy night, one by one, two women show up at the door of an unnamed narrator, a doctor at a mental hospital. The first woman is unknown to him, whilst the other he's been waiting for. He is at first desirous of the first woman but then acknowledges his fearfulness of her. The flesh of her hip bone protrudes from under her clothing. The first woman says that she is one of the 'disappeared,' and was once a great writer but now only writes of remembrances having lost her manuscript. Her name is Amaro Davila, who is, in reality, a marginalized Mexican female writer whom the author used the writings to focus her central character's enigma. The second woman is known as The Betrayed, as he left her and their relationship behind to live and take a job by the ocean, where he is able to stop believing in reality. He says she wanted too much from him and he's not good with women. The women move in and make themselves at home, quickly developing a close-knit bond together with their own secret language. One day they claim to know his secret, that he is indeed a woman which he denies. As he goes on a search for the first woman's missing manuscript in the hospital archives, he begins to uncover strange truths that he finds he must substantiate to make sense of them. A time period of 25 years is unaccounted for in his search.

There are two sides to everything, a North City and South City, The False One and The True One. The hip bone is also a recurrent theme. The doctor says he remembers life as a Tree meaning his rigidness and feelings of being paralyzed forever.

[Víctor · Rating 4 out of 5]

Es una lectura que me ha hecho dudar constantemente, ¿se trata de un thriller? O ¿por qué a ratos pienso que estoy leyendo un relato fantástico con tintes de terror?

Así me he sentido y una vez terminada no se explicar sobre qué trata exactamente, solo se que en parte me ha recordado a lo que me transmiten algunas de las novelas oníricas de Murakami.

Para bien o para mal, no puede dejarte indiferente.

[alexis · Rating 5 out of 5]

I LOVED reading this book. Surrealist gothic horror about gender….hell yeah… Rivera Garza’s use of imagery and symbolism will make you feel like you’re in a high school AP literature class sometimes, but I genuinely enjoyed detangling everything.

The only major named character in this book ends up being a fictionalized version of the real life feminist horror writer Amparo Dávila, so I DO recommend reading her short story collection The Houseguest before starting this (assuming you aren’t fluent in Spanish, obviously - as of 2023 The Houseguest is just the only English language collection available). Sarah Booker’s translator’s note at the end of this book also does a good job contextualizing the broad strokes without spoiling anything, and I think most people will probably benefit from reading it first, rather than at the end.

[Yan · Rating 2 out of 5]

Very challenging to read. Got lost several times, and am a bit frustrated that there’s no certain clarity…I did like the overall atmosphere though

[lucy✨ · Rating 5 out of 5]

5 stars

“I didn’t know what to do with the remnants of my body, my silence, the tongue that crowded behind my teeth. My own ruins.”

The Iliac Crest is a novel that explores, transcends, pushes against and fractures boundaries. As we follow the desperate attempts of the protagonist to reaffirm their identity, the author exposes the fragility of binaries that some societies still cling to. What we define ourselves by are reduced to the artificial letters and sounds that they are, which destabilises the foundations of our reality.

I love texts that uproot and question human concepts, so this one was really captivating. I look forward to rereading this many times in the future.

[talia ♡ · Rating 4 out of 5]

literally, the two wolves that were within me the entire time reading this book were: "oh HELL yeah" and "what. the. fuck"....

[Vishy · Rating 4 out of 5]

One of my favourite discoveries which happened last year was when I read Asja Bakić's 'Mars'. I discovered that Bakić's book was published by The Feminist Press. I was excited when I discovered that and went and checked their catalogue. It was amazing! I asked myself why I hadn't heard of this beautiful publisher before. Of course, I just wanted to buy everything which was there in their catalogue. I resisted temptation and decided to get a few. 'The Iliac Crest' by Cristina Rivera Garza was one of the books I got.

At the beginning of the story, the narrator is sitting in his home reading a book when he hears a knock at his door. He opens it and he sees an unknown, beautiful woman outside. She just walks into his house, without saying anything. The narrator is puzzled. After a while, there is a second knock, and the narrator's ex-girlfriend walks in. She is wet because of the rain and she seems to be unwell. The stranger who came in before takes care of the ex-girlfriend and these two women settle down in the house, as if it is their own. The narrator is not able to say anything. He is gripped with fear. Before long, one day, the two women approach him and tell him that they know his deepest secret. The narrator wonders what that is. The strange woman says that they know that he is actually a woman! The narrator is stunned!

What happens after this – who is this strange woman, why is she here, is the secret about the narrator true, what happens after that – all these are told in the rest of the story.

Though the above is part of the story, this book is not about the plot. It raises important questions on the fluidity of gender, on the fluidity of national borders, on the fluid boundaries between madness and sanity. Who is a man and who is a woman, who is mad and who is sane – the book asks these questions and makes us think. This is not a book to be read once and enjoyed for the plot. It is a book to be read multiple times with close readings, a book to be lingered on, to be contemplated upon, to be discussed with fellow readers. I think I'll read it again closely, one of these days.

Cristina Rivera Garza is one of Mexico's great contemporary writers. I noticed that just three of her books are available in English translation. I hope to read the other two sometime.

I enjoyed reading 'The Iliac Crest'. It wasn't a straightforward book and it was always challenging, and there was a surreal atmosphere throughout the book, but Cristina Rivera Garza's prose was beautiful, her sentences sizzled with beautiful depth in many places which made me pause and linger on them, the dark humour in some places made me smile, and though I am not sure what happened in the end, I'm glad I read the book.

I'll leave you with some of my favourite passages from the book.

"I had imagined a dwelling more crowded with things, more populated with history, more marked by time. But I don’t believe I was disappointed to see the apartment only had the furniture necessary for an austere existence, and that within the property, bordered by walls in neutral colors and lacking any kind of ornamentation, what was truly noteworthy were the currents of light and air. There was a sensation of impasse, of something held, not within time but somewhere outside of it, far from its shore, foreign to its imperial power. There, at her side, in her home, I felt as if I were inside a parenthesis in a sentence written in an unknown language."

"My instincts advised me to do so without any hesitation, but in those days I acted fundamentally against myself. Contradiction drove me. Paradox gave me courage."

"As soon as I looked inside, I was forced to accept that my absence had doubtlessly been longer than I had suspected. There was, in the space whose familiarity had once rendered it transparent, a mild untidiness, a faint but notable change in the way it reflected my inhabitance. The way it felt distanced from me. The furniture was in the same place, as was the opening of the fireplace that had helped me combat the coastal cold so many times, and also the curtainless windows that allowed all of the ocean’s potential to enter. The decorations were the same. There wasn’t a single change in the number or size of the lamps, paintings, or bookcases. I mean to say there was nothing physical that could explain the transformation I was experiencing. The change wasn’t there, outside of myself, but in the relationship I was establishing with the space. In other words, I did not recognize my own home. If I were talking about its structure, the sensation I felt could be described, perhaps, as discord. It made me feel out of place."

Have you read 'The Iliac Crest'? What do you think about it?

[Grisbell · Rating 4 out of 5]

Una lectura desafiante, bizarra y enigmática. Sin duda el factor que más llamó mi atención fue el homenaje que la autora hace a Amparo Dávila, una de mis autoras favoritas.