{"id":41,"date":"2023-04-10T19:31:41","date_gmt":"2023-04-11T02:31:41","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/span312discussion\/?p=41"},"modified":"2023-04-10T19:31:41","modified_gmt":"2023-04-11T02:31:41","slug":"week-thirteen-the-taiga-syndrome","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/span312discussion\/2023\/04\/10\/week-thirteen-the-taiga-syndrome\/","title":{"rendered":"Week thirteen- The Taiga Syndrome"},"content":{"rendered":"

For the final book of the term, I read \u201cThe Taiga Syndrome\u201d 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 \u201cfairy tale run amok\u201d, 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.<\/span><\/p>\n

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\u2019t ever get to know the narrator\u2019s 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 \u201cDistant Star\u201d or \u201cI, Rigoberta Menchu\u201d, and began to think about how reliable the narrator of \u201cThe Taiga Syndrome\u201d may be. After much reflection, there are a couple of reasons why I don\u2019t 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 \u201call the cases I was unable to solve, had helped me to tell stories.\u201d In this same chapter, she also openly admits that her stories reflect cases that she has worked on \u201cbut [she] wrote them differently\u201d to show \u201chow they still vibrate, right now, in the imagination\u201d. With this in mind, how do we know what details are true to the case and what are elements that \u201cvibrate in the imagination\u201d?<\/span><\/p>\n

I would love to hear more ideas and thoughts about this from others, so for this week\u2019s discussion question, I want to ask you all: how reliable do you think the narrator in this story is?<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

For the final book of the term, I read \u201cThe Taiga Syndrome\u201d 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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":94962,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[35],"tags":[36,37,38],"class_list":["post-41","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-rivera-garza","tag-identity","tag-imagination","tag-reliability"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/span312discussion\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/span312discussion\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/span312discussion\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/span312discussion\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/94962"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/span312discussion\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=41"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/span312discussion\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":42,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/span312discussion\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41\/revisions\/42"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/span312discussion\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=41"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/span312discussion\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=41"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/span312discussion\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=41"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}