This week’s reading, The Taiga Syndrome, by Cristina Rivera Garza is really weird. But I liked it? Particularly the explicit sex scenes took me by surprise, and yet they were written with such distance and in sometimes disturbingly medical terms without seeming objective at all. It was half uncomfortable and half enrapturing to read, which makes for an odd experience. The tiny creatures having sex was mostly just uncomfortable though. For the end of the class, this book was very appropriate because in some ways it felt like it touched on almost all the recurring themes throughout the semester: play, time, sex, gender, colonial imposition, capitalism, translation …
The temporality of the work was very interesting. About half way through the narrator is describing the events as though they have been in the taiga for a very long time but a few pages later you learn it has only been three days since arriving in the village. The sense of time that the characters are experiencing is brilliantly portrayed through the writing.
The question of whether this is a Latin American novel is interesting. I think that being written by someone with a Latin American context, history and understanding, it should be considered a Latin American text; however, this does not mean that the work should only be read with the Latin American tradition in mind. the themes are more widely applicable and do not make a claim or statement solely about Latin America. The work does not lose value and the reader does not lose insight by applying the themes of the book to broader or different contexts beyond Latin America. By narrowing the scope some findings might be lost though. Personally, I believe it speaks to the quality of a text if it can be understood differently without loosing meaning in different contexts.
While watching the lecture I had a realisation about a potential note on colonial history. Not only are forces like capitalism encroaching on these ‘wild’ spaces but the Grimm fairytales are imposed on this narrative in a totally different narrative among different people to where these fairytales were created. By using these fairytales as a framework the story or history of the events is being written by or being told through the lens of others’ narratives.
Questions for the class:
- What do you think the woman who escaped to the forest was seeking and do you think she found it?
- How did you understand the constant medicalisation of the detectives fantastical surroundings?
“By using these fairytales as a framework the story or history of the events is being written by or being told through the lens of others’ narratives.” Indeed, this novel plays a lot with the “frameworks” with which we can tell a story, and for this reason I also think it is a very appropriate way to end this class. Some people put Rivera Garza as part of a generation of Mexican writers who are trying to find more “universal” themes and places to place their stories. In fact, at the time that provoked debates about what “Mexican Literature” was. But we’ll probably talk about that in class.
Hey! Thanks for your post 🙂 I especially like your thoughts on the novel’s more sexual moments being “written with such distance and in sometimes disturbingly medical terms without seeming objective at all”—I completely agree and also found the part with the tiny creatures super disturbing.
I think the woman’s escape to the forest may have been less about seeking something greater/a change in landscape, but speaks more to a desire to escape her husband, whose anger is exemplified through the violence inflicted on the narrator at the end of the book.