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Liliana’s Invincible Summer

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........

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