HAVANA TIMES – I read “Liliana’s Invincible Summer” (2021) as part of a reading cycle to catch up on recent literature and, above all, to read what women in Latin America are writing. Before starting it, I already knew what it was about and that it had won the Pulitzer Prize, but not much more. I finished it quickly because it is not a particularly complex read, either narratively or structurally.
That is not to say that the book lacks technical daring. Its Mexican author, Cristina Rivera Garza (1964), uses real objects to move the story forward and, more importantly, to give a voice to someone who can no longer speak. Those objects, however, are letters, and what the book includes is their transcribed text, so it is not difficult to follow the story or identify the characters. There are also letters and testimonies from Liliana’s friends and family during her university years.
The book moves between two time periods: the present, when Cristina tries to locate the case file concerning the crime committed against her sister, and the past, which reconstructs Liliana’s life in the 1990s, up until the moment of her femicide. The present-day search occupies only the first chapter and part of the second. From that point on, Liliana tells the story. That is a figure of speech, of course, meaning that the narrative advances thanks to the meticulous archive she kept of every letter she wrote or received. This is precisely one of the aspects I consider fundamental to the book: its emphasis on the victim.
If we define true crime as any book that recounts an actual crime while remaining faithful to the facts, then Liliana’s Invincible Summer is a work of true crime. And in that case, it is a deeply moving one, because it was written by a woman recounting the final years of her sister’s life, a victim of femicide.
From this perspective, when compared with other classics of the genre, such as In Cold Blood (1965), what stands out in Rivera Garza’s book is that the narrative voice stays close to the victim rather than the perpetrator, as is the case in Truman Capote’s (1924) novel. Neither technique is better than the other, but there is a profound ideological difference. Liliana’s Invincible Summer is a book that takes a necessary stand, especially in a country like Mexico, where “…ten femicides are committed every day” and where “femicide was not classified as a crime (…) until August 14, 2012.”
From that perspective, Cristina says a great deal without having to state it explicitly. She tells us, for example, that a victim—of whatever kind of violence—is much more than a victim, much more than that reductive label. She tells us that someone who has suffered may or may not also have mistreated others, without turning that possibility into some sinister chain of cause and effect leading inevitably to the crime.
Cristina says that her book “is an excavation into the life of a brilliant and daring woman who lacked, as we ourselves did, as everyone else did, the language necessary to identify, denounce, and fight against sexist violence and intimate partner terrorism, which characterize so many patriarchal relationships.”
This is the struggle the author pursues throughout the book: language as an essential weapon for recognizing and denouncing violence. Naming things gives them life, but it also brings them into the debate within the collective unconscious. It means fighting over the boundaries of what can be known and understood. Rivera explains that before femicide was legally defined as a crime in her country—“Anyone who deprives a woman of her life for reasons of gender commits the crime of femicide”—such killings were commonly called “crimes of passion.”
People said the girl had failed to protect herself, that she had played with fire, that she had provoked him. And ultimately, if nothing was known about her that sexist and conservative morality could object to, people would simply say, “She must have done something.” The terrible thing is that the past tense is wrong here. People didn’t just say these things; they still say them. And this is a problem that also exists, to a considerable degree, in Cuban society.
But Cristina delivers the final blow: “The lack of language is overwhelming. The lack of language ties our hands, suffocates us, strangles us, shoots us, flays us, dismembers us, condemns us.”
The author, whose work consistently reflects a feminist perspective, discovered all of this through her research and reflection. “One can spend many years not knowing, but once one wants to know, one wants to know everything immediately.” She discovered that the femicidal violence that ultimately took her sister’s life had begun when Liliana was barely a teenager, when a boyfriend decided that she would not be allowed to leave him. She also discovered that violence does its work “underground and relentlessly.”
The result is a book that should not have to exist, a book no one would ever want to write. But it is also a beautiful and necessary book, because perhaps these things should never have happened, perhaps they should never happen at all. But since they do happen, it is better to denounce them, to reclaim what was lost, and to fight. Because “one does not learn to remain silent; one is forced into silence. One is silenced.”
Cristina asks herself this question at the beginning of the book, in the present-day narrative, and provides her own answer: “Who, in a world where the word femicide did not exist, where the words intimate partner terrorism did not exist, could have said what I now say without the slightest doubt: the only difference between my sister and me is that I never crossed paths with a murderer?”
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