La muerte me da / Death Takes Me

En la lista de los mejores libros del 2025 de: The New York Times Book Review, The New Yorker, Esquire, Marie Claire

«La novela es densa y elíptica, un paisaje onírico con una poderosa resaca […]. [Una] desgarradora y laberíntica obra maestra.» -Katie Kitamura, The New York Times

«Cuídate de mí, amor mío / cuídate de la silenciosa del desierto». Este verso de Alejandra Pizarnik aparece escrito con esmalte de uñas en la pared de un callejón, junto al cadáver mutilado de un hombre. La primera en descubrirlo es la profesora Cristina Rivera Garza. Tras avisar a la policía, es interrogada por una detective en homicidios que le pide examinar la fotografía de la escena del crimen. Al reconocer de inmediato el verso, la profesora se convierte en informante clave del caso. Pronto aparecen nuevas víctimas junto a otros poemas, lo que apunta a un asesino en serie. La detective comienza una lista de sospechosos, mientras que la profesora recibe la primera nota siniestra de alguien que las está acechando.

Publicada por primera vez en 2007, La muerte me da es una novela visionaria y emocionante. Escrita por la ganadora del premio Pulitzer y una de las voces literarias más relevantes en el mundo hispano, Cristina Rivera Garza, esta historia pone en jaque los tópicos tradicionales de la novela policiaca y nos devuelve, como un espejo, preguntas inquietantes sobre el deseo y la muerte.

ENGLISH DESCRIPTION

New York Times Notable Book of 2025

From the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Liliana’s Invincible Summer, a dreamlike, genre-defying novel about a professor and detective seeking justice in a world suffused with gendered violence.

“Deeply rewarding . . . a dreamscape with a powerful undertow . . . [a] harrowing and labyrinthine masterpiece.”—Katie Kitamura, The New York Times (Editors’ Choice)

A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR: The New York Times Book Review, The New Yorker, Esquire, Marie Claire

A city is always a cemetery.

A professor named Cristina Rivera Garza stumbles upon the corpse of a mutilated man in a dark alley and reports it to the police. When shown a crime scene photo, she finds a stark warning written in tiny print with coral nail polish on the brick wall beside the body: “Beware of me, my love / beware of the silent woman in the desert.”

The professor becomes the first informant on the case, which is led by a detective newly obsessed with poetry and trailed by a long list of failures. But what has the professor really seen? As the bodies of more castrated men are found alongside lines of verse, the detective tries to decipher the meaning of the poems to put a stop to the violence spreading throughout the city.

Originally written in Spanish, where the word “victim” is always feminine, Death Takes Me is a thrilling masterpiece of literary fiction that flips the traditional crime narrative of gendered violence on its head. As sharp as the cuts on the bodies of the victims, it unfolds with the charged logic of a dream, moving from the police station to the professor’s classroom and through the slippery worlds of Latin American poetry and art in an imaginative exploration of the unstable terrains of desire and sexuality.