For the final book of the term, I read “The Taiga Syndrome” by Cristina Rivera Garza. While it was the last book, it did not disappoint and is definitely up there on my list of favourite stories we read this term. I was originally intrigued by this book for its description as a detective story and a “fairy tale run amok”, but was immediately drawn in by the unique plot and approach the story took that I was not at all expecting. To elaborate, one of my favourite genres of books is mystery, so when the plot began with a simple missing person case I was excited to see where the story would take the narrator and what journey she would embark on, ultimately thinking she would solve the case and bring back good news (like most mystery stories). However, the complexity of her adventure of finding the missing second wife of the man who hired the ex-detective made me rethink how mystery stories are traditionally told and made me fall in love with the feverish imagination it illuminated.
One thing that I did note in this story that has been discussed in many of the other stories we read this term is that we don’t ever get to know the narrator’s name. In fact, we never get the names of any of the characters discussed in this story, despite them being quite central to the story. This made me reflect on some of the reasons we mentioned in previous weeks as to why this might be the case, such as to hide or distance their personal identity from the reader. Furthermore, I remembered our previous discussions about the reliability of the narrator in certain stories, such as “Distant Star” or “I, Rigoberta Menchu”, and began to think about how reliable the narrator of “The Taiga Syndrome” may be. After much reflection, there are a couple of reasons why I don’t believe the narrator to be the most reliable (though this is sometimes hard to account for given that it is a fictional book). As mentioned early in the story, the ex-detective has had many failures in her past cases, while also living a life now as a discrete writer of noir novellas in which “all the cases I was unable to solve, had helped me to tell stories.” In this same chapter, she also openly admits that her stories reflect cases that she has worked on “but [she] wrote them differently” to show “how they still vibrate, right now, in the imagination”. With this in mind, how do we know what details are true to the case and what are elements that “vibrate in the imagination”?
I would love to hear more ideas and thoughts about this from others, so for this week’s discussion question, I want to ask you all: how reliable do you think the narrator in this story is?
Thank you for your blog post, especially for the final paragraph, very insightful. I think you’ve hit the nail on the head with that characterization of the narrator. We are already accustomed to questioning who is telling the story -from where and why-, and to thinking about the characteristics of those narrative voices. The examples of Bolaño and Menchú fit well in your argument. Although she is the one who guides us in the plot, she is not necessarily the one who can tell us everything with the greatest clarity. What role should the reader of this novel play then?
Excellent post! I also addressed the matter of the detective’s credibility in my post this week, and I think that as a reader, being informed at the start that the detective was incapable of doing her job has already undermined her reliability. Furthermore, I believe that the portrayal of the detective as someone who rewrote the stories of her investigated yet unsolved cases differently, was precisely what the author intended in order to engage the readers in the story, encouraging them to inquire and fill in any gaps.
Thanks for the well-thought post! I love the idea that the narrators description of events might not be entirely accurate and it made me think of the more bizarre moments which could have multiple interpretations behind them. I think that the detectives description did actually happen, in the sense that, they are what the detective themself experienced happening to them.