In an author’s note at the start of the book, The Iliac Crest is described as “a novel delving into the fluid nature of gender dis/identifications,” “set in a time in which disappearance has become a plague,” and a book in which “borders are a subtle but pervasive force” (vii). That all sounded pretty exciting to me but, alas, I didn’t end up loving this book. I think the problem is just as likely to be with me as with it: maybe I wasn’t in the right mood for this kind of vague and allusive story; maybe I would have appreciated it more if I knew more about Mexican history and literature; maybe I like weird books more when I feel like I have more to somehow hold onto. Which isn’t to say I didn’t like this book, just that I didn’t quite connect with it as much as I’d hoped to.
The start of the book felt promising: an unnamed narrator thinks back to a stormy night, a knock at his door. He’d been waiting for an ex-lover to arrive, but the woman outside is a stranger. It’s raining; she’s soaked; he lets her in. He recounts their meeting as a moment in which he saw her and wanted her, but then backtracks: “that’s not how it went,” he says: “I did not feel desire but fear” (6). The woman, who has introduced herself as Amparo Dávila, tells the narrator she knows him, but not in any way we can make sense of: “I know you from when you were a tree,” she says (8). And then the narrator’s ex arrives, and promptly faints. The stranger who introduced herself as Amparo Dávila stays with the narrator and his ex (he calls her the Betrayed), nursing her back to health, though it’s the narrator who’s a doctor: he’s busy at work, though, at a nearby hospital for the terminally ill. The narrator worries about the weird situation at home: he wonders if the stranger and his ex know each other; if they’re plotting against him somehow. He worries more when he realizes the two of them are speaking what seems to be a private language: it’s nothing he’s ever heard or can make sense of. The plot gets more complicated, with a missing manuscript and questions of identity and disappearance; in addition to saying she knows him from when he was a tree, the stranger also tells the narrator she knows his secret. “I know you are a woman,” she says, though the narrator is pretty sure he isn’t (40). Things get weird in various ways, with the narrator hunting through the hospital archives, looking up Amparo Dávila in the phone book, and getting into trouble with his boss. Maybe things have always been weird: the narrator’s story of how the Betrayed came to be called that has something of the feeling of a fable. The narrator reads about Amparo Dávila’s writing and notes that it’s full of “wickedness, the fantastical, the inescapable”—and at least some of those elements are present in this book, too, go figure (53). There are dreams and images that are like dreams, and adding to the dreamy atmosphere is the ocean by which the narrator lives and works: the ocean and its shifting light, the ocean and its shifting weather.
I think my favorite part of this book, though, is a multipage list near the end of things that can be done from a hospital bed, maybe because it’s funny and concrete and fairly straightforward, a little bit of relative clarity in the midst of a story that felt intriguing but also bewildering, though I realize that the feeling of being adrift may be part of the point.
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