The Taiga Syndrome

 
 
The Taiga Syndrome

by Cristina Rivera Garza
translated by Suzanne Jill Levine and Aviva Kana
Dorothy Project

2018

 

 

The Taiga Syndrome is a Latin American detective story. It's marketed as a novel, but barely 100 pages long, with pretty generous font size and margins.

 
A rich man hires a woman who used to be a detective to find his second wife, who has run off with another man to the taiga, presumably in Canada or Russia. The wife has sent her husband a telegram at each stop along her journey, and the rich man wants the detective to retrace it. 

 
The man suspects his wife has 'Taiga Syndrome,' supposedly the urge one feels, when deep in the wilderness, to go even deeper and get completely lost.

 
So the detective flies off, she hires a man to be her translator, and they find the tiny village that was the missing wife's last known stop. She and the translator spend the majority of the novella trying to find out what the missing wife and her boyfriend did in the village and where they may have gone next. They make a few unsettling discoveries that are unrelated to the couple.

 
Eventually they do find the missing wife, who tells them that she's not going back. The detective returns home and reports to the man who hired her, he gets angry and beats her up.

 
The book is narrated first-person. The text is spate, and a bit dream-like, especially as things get weird. It reminds me a bit of Anna Kaven's Ice. The narrator occasionally likens the missing couple to Hansel and Gretel and herself to Red Riding Hood. I also initially thought the narrator might end up replicating the wife's story, but no, she solves the case and goes home. The whole story is quite brief and stays at an emotional remove, many events are implied rather than described. It really is much more like a long short story than a short novel.

I previously enjoyed Barbara Comyns' Who Was Changed and Who Was Dead, from the same publisher.