Translation Rights TQE / Ilion’s Crest

A man answers the knocking at his door during a turbulent and rainy night, and without suspecting it, welcomes uncertainty and truth into his home.  Amparo Dávila arrives as ghosts do, without bothering to ask permission.   She has brought with her, to stay, a woman whom he loved years ago, and the infection of Disappearance, a malignant and undetected virus that turns the characters into guests of the fog.  That man, a doctor dedicated to the care of the terminally ill in a death-ridden pavilion, can hardly manage to see that his trajectory has fused with that of a demented and suicidal patient whose story has already been forgotten.  It also fuses with the trajectory of various women who seem to know more about him than he knows about himself.  They know, for instance, of the fear that men feel when they stand before a woman.  A once lost and recuperated manuscript, a clinical story with a terrible ending, indicates the spiral trajectory that narrows toward a final and terrible truth, like a tornado. 

Cristina Rivera Garza was born on the north-eastern Mexican frontier and currently lives between San Diego and Tijuana.  She is the author of a body of work that touches many genres, novel, short story, poetry and essay; that is interdisciplinary, literature and history; that is written in her native language, Spanish, and in her second language, English.  She has written articles for the Hispanic American Historical Review and for The Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences, as well as for other publications in the United States.  Cristina Rivera Garza has obtained six of the most prestigious literary awards in Mexico.  Her books include La más mía (The Most Mine), poems, 1998; La guerra no importa (War Doesn’t Matter), 1991.  Her novel Nadie me verá llorar (No One Will See Me Cry), Tusquets 2000, won the National Prize José Rubén Romero, the Impac-Conarte-ITESM Prize and, in 2001, the Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz Prize.  The novel has had an unprecedented success.