Translation Rights TQE / No One Will See Me Cry

Joaquín Buitrago, an ex-photographer of prostitutes and a portraitist in the mental hospital of La Castañeda in 1920, believes to have identified in one of the patients, Matilda Burgos, as a prostitute who he met years before in La Modernidad. 

His obsession to confirm Matilda’s identity leads him to get a hold of her medical records.  Joaquín will learn that she was a country girl adopted by her uncle, a doctor, and led a peaceful life until Cástulo, a young revolutionary, hid in her room from the authorities. This served to open Matilda’s eyes:  the social turbulence will lead her to break away from her uncle and to take refuge with Diamantina Vicario, whose house is used to cook up political conspiracies.  Her death will affect Matilda to such an extent that she will begin to wander without a direction, outside of herself, and to try out all types of occupations and positions, including the horizontal one.  While the photographer learns of so many vicissitudes, he becomes convinced that Matilda and he must attempt at a life together.  From their common defeat of morality and reason, and with a will fractured by a repressing society, they seek to found among the ruins an uncertain future that will, to some extent restore their liberty.

“There are books that […] take some time to receive the recognition that they deserve.  I believe that this is the case of the extraordinary novel by the Mexican writer Cristina Rivera Garza, titled Nadie me verá llorar (No One Will See Me Cry).  It was published in 1999 and has not reached the deserved repercussion.  I have given the book to European editors that did not know her either.  Their enthusiasm runs similar to mine.  We are before one of the most notable works of fiction, not only within Mexican literature, but rather in the Spanish language at this turn of the century”.

Carlos Fuentes, El País

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.