E.M. Forster wrote in his commonplace book “only things seen sideways sink deep.” This quote is very apposite to the fiction of Cristina Rivera Garza. She recently won the Pulitzer Prize for non-fiction; however, it is her fiction that is strangely engrossing and compelling, albeit unsettling and mysterious. In the midst of her novel Death Takes Me, Rivera Garza writes: “What is really happening? This the novel cannot know.” I like her experimentation: Death Takes Me is an unusual hybrid of genres. Her introduction to this book of short stories was very illuminating, particularly her notion of the reader as an accomplice or co-conspirator. Using the metaphor of buildings, she says that if a novel can be thought of as a house, a short story is akin to a room or a habitation. The final section of the collection, Diminitus, experiments with the very short form, and as can be gleaned from the Latin, the “habitations” are very small spaces, perhaps the corner of a room.

‘Reincarnation’ comprises approximately seventy isolated sentences; there are no paragraphs. It is about a couple whose two-year-old son has died and their bereavement has led to estrangement, if not anger. Language is never a handmaiden to the narrative in Rivera Garza’s writing. She uses the word affliction to describe the state of the couple. “The affliction could be heard in the ringing of her heels on the marble floor. The affliction is a matter of excess of order.” Sentences about the couple are intercalated with interjections by the narrator making pronouncements not only on the couple’s situation, but also general observations about the human condition, as well as the role of language. “The crime is a place to which you have to return. Language is like that. The same can be said about accidental death.” The nature of the exposition behooves the reader to become an accomplice in creating meaning for the story.

Available in New and Selected Stories, Dorothy, A Publishing Project, 2022