Books by Mexican author and professor Cristina Rivera Garza tend to defy expectation and genre. In 2020, Rivera Garza was named a MacArthur Genius Fellow, and in 2024, her book, Liliana's Invincible Summer won the Pulitzer Prize for memoir or autobiography. Her latest work is a translation of her 2007 novel La muerte me da (Death Takes Me), translated by Robin Myers and Sarah Booker.
Death Takes Me, according to Rivera Garza, is a provocation into an imagined string of murders. With each body, a poem by the Argentine writer Alejandra Pizarnik marks the scene of the crime.
"This novel is veering away from a plot based narrative," Rivera Garza said of the complex storylines in this book. "There is a detective, a woman detective who finds herself suddenly in charge of a very gruesome, enigmatic series of killings against men in a city that is plagued by violence."
Cristina Rivera Garza joined NPR's A Martínez on Morning Edition to talk about this novel, the work of translation, and the power of words.
This interview was lightly edited for length and clarity.
Martinez: Why is it important that all the victims are men? And actually in the story, all the men are sexually mutilated. So why is that important in this case?
Rivera Garza: It has to do with the context in which I wrote this novel. I was living in Mexico for a while, and as everybody else I was being bombarded by news, news of violence related to the misnamed "War on Drugs." I had to confront, like everybody else in Mexico, daily gruesome scenes of killings and murders, specifically about the killing of women, of poor young women, specifically located on the US-Mexico border in Ciudad Juárez. And so I was trying to think through this violence to see what language could do against this violence. So I decided to make the male body the recipient of this violence in order to see if we could pay closer attention.
Martínez: When things happen to men, all of a sudden, men are worried. Men care when it's happening to them.
Rivera Garza: We live in societies that have high tolerance for the suffering of women and that has invited the perpetration of violence against women. To me, it was really important to swap these places to see that even though in Spanish the word victim is always feminine– it's La Victima. So what do we do when we are faced with this violence that is perpetrated specifically against men for sexual reasons? My bet was that we were going to be paying a little bit more attention and I wanted that attention on the novel, but also on the reality that was causing that violence.
Martínez: I knew it before, Cristina, but when you said it again that in Spanish victim is in the feminine, victima, it just kind of blows me away that that's the default.
Rivera Garza: Yeah. And that's another reason why I pay a lot of attention, in this novel, I would say that the protagonist of this novel is language as such. There is a grammar of violence. The way in which we speak, the way in which we name, has bearings on reality, has consequences. And thinking about the gendered nature of both language and urban space was really important for me in the writing of the novel.
Martínez: So tell us about that translation process, because I'm fascinated by this, Cristina, the novel published in 2007. How often since 2007 did you think about the book?
Rivera Garza: I have done that with other books, by the way. In this case, since the context hasn't varied much, I mean, violence continues to be a feature of daily life, both in Mexico and the Americas in general. I have been having to rethink and revise my own views and my own experience with violence. And for that reason, I think that this is the moment for the book to be translated into English. I think it has something to say not only about what was happening in Mexico in 2007, but about what we are going through right now. In 2025. When we began to talk about the translation, I was very happy that Sarah Booker and Robin Meyers were in charge of this project.
Martínez: Yeah, now Liliana's Invincible Summer, that's a book celebrating the life of your sister Liliana, who was murdered in 1990. Now, in it, you go back to Mexico City years later to document her case. That book, Cristina, you translated that one yourself. I'm wondering why you made that decision to do that one alone.
Rivera Garza: Well, in fact, I don't see that as a translation as such. It was quite different. I found myself, I caught myself, in fact, writing this book both in English and in Spanish at the same time, in different days, depending on issues that I'm still trying to figure out. The way in which I explain that process now, having gone through it, is that I was dealing with a matter of such magnitude emotionally for me, that I needed English as a protection, as a buffer, to tell a story of facts that had taken place in a different language.
Martínez: So you went back and forth, English and Spanish, different days?
Rivera Garza: Every day. Yes. Some days I would start in Spanish and then, without warning or even a conscious decision on my side, I would start some other days in English. And so what I did, instead of correcting myself, trying to do things as I usually do them, what I decided was to follow that process and to see where it would take me. But in this case, at least personally, I have a lot to think about the relationship between mourning, between grieving, and between pain, generally speaking, and bilingualism and living in a different language, and how this so-called second language or this other language may provide you with opportunities and freedoms that the language that you grew up with could not afford.
This interview was produced for digital by Majd Al-Waheidi.
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