The atmospheric prose and fairytale recallings—a Hansel-and-Gretel (grownup, non-sibling) couple; the narrator as a sort of Little Red Riding Hood with a wolf at the door (and in the Taiga)—should’ve made this work for me, but as a whole it didn’t.

I was intrigued by ideas in the middle of chapters—there’s lots of space for thought—though I never felt captured from the end of one chapter to the next. And if I hadn’t been captivated by [a:Tara Lynn Masih|2889627|Tara Lynn Masih|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1508879584p2/2889627.jpg]’s story of the Siberian Taiga, “Notes to THE WORLD,” in her collection [b:How We Disappear: Novella & Stories|60531676|How We Disappear Novella & Stories|Tara Lynn Masih|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1646236624l/60531676._SY75_.jpg|95396566], I’m not sure I would’ve been able to picture Garza’s Taiga.

We all carry a forest inside us…

‘This is not a fairy tale, detective,’ an unnamed man seeking out his second wife tells the narrator early on in Cristina Rivera Garza’s eerily exquisite nightmare of a novel The Taiga Syndrome. The man has a penchant for leading women by the elbow to corral them without consent into the confines of his ego and is bewildered that his second wife has run off with a man into the vast wilderness of the taiga.

Taiga (noun): also known as a boreal forest or snow forest, is a biome characterized by coniferous forests consisting mostly of pines, spruces, and larches.

Taiga Syndrome (noun): ‘inhabitants of the Taiga begin to suffer terrible anxiety attacks and make suicidal attempts to escape’

‘We all carry a forest inside us, yes’ the narrator later says, meaning a wilderness we escape into, or escape from. This includes the wife who fills diaries with bland entries but occasionally questions what it is a bird can see when they look into a window. The wife has left, leaving a breadcrumb trail of postcards with lines like “WHAT ARE WE LETTING IN WHEN WE SAY GOODBYE?” scrawled in ‘the urgency of capital letters’. Thus begins a journey to find the missing woman. Along the way, the narrator detective finds herself immersed in a haunting fairy tale in which language, love and leaving are all menacing eyes peering out from the dark forests of the taiga to watch the oppressive ways that capitalist power corrupts, controls and consumes us. Here is a detective noir with surrealism filling in for the usual motif of fog, creating a metaphorical fog out of language and the various ways storytelling and society is framed through power constructs. Unsettling in the best of ways, The Taiga Syndrome is a stunning achievement of atmosphere and language that marvelously blends fairy tale with social commentary to question the choice of being confined in oppressive structure or lost forever in a metaphysical wilderness. And everywhere are wolves.

The Taiga Syndrome takes the baton from the rich history of Latin American literature and races with it deep into the forest like a cross country runner. Brazo’s Bookstore provides a blurb, noting that the novel feels like ‘A detective novel directed by David Lynch & narrated by Bolaño.’, and comparisons to [a:Juan Rulfo|21778|Juan Rulfo|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1226313372p2/21778.jpg] as well as undercurrents of [a:Silvina Ocampo|112535|Silvina Ocampo|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1579558721p2/112535.jpg] and [a:Leonora Carrington|26359|Leonora Carrington|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1208208137p2/26359.jpg] are easy enough (and, possibly, lazy) to make. The book is, arguably, all of these (like Rulfo’s [b:Pedro Páramo|38787|Pedro Páramo|Juan Rulfo|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1500663791l/38787._SY75_.jpg|1786290], both deal with a location where the inability to leave accrues with each page like an hourglass running out of sand), yet comparisons distract from the fact that this is an entirely original piece combining these elements with those of fairy tales--Hansel and Gretel as well as Little Red Riding Hood are directly called out and analyzed in the narrative--to create an engrossing work of feminist and social symbolism that is way more than the sum of its parts. The playfulness of archetypal motifs and symbols from both fairy tales and noirs being thrown into a linguistic blender is part of one of the book’s most entertaining methods of building atmosphere: everything is familiar yet horrifyingly alien all at once.

’Breathlessly’ is an adverb with rhythm.’

The book is nearly a sensory overload of sights, sounds, smells and ineffable anxiety all emanating from static words on the page so potent that they bear a resemblance to how silent trees in a dark forest can culminate in a pitch of implacable terror once you begin to question what lurks in their shadows. Cristina Rivera Garza employs language to its maximum potential with minimal strokes that take unexpected turns. The language is sparse yet dense and flows almost like poetry instead of prose. There are incomplete sentences, repetitions of phrases, and musings that loop and swirl as if to elude the reader. There is also an astonishing use of language that makes the narration feels unstuck from linear time. Not only is the book told in a non-linear fashion, but also sentences eloquently push and pull the reader back and forth on the timeline leaving the reader unsettled yet unjarred. Time, it seems, is one of the many social constructs being called into question by the novel. It is told from a present long after the events have unfolded and sometimes within the span of a single sentence places you in the past, uses future tenses to explain what will happen and then seamlessly returns to past tense verbs. The effect, I imagine, is much more poetically visible in the original Spanish but still shines in translation.

Being a translated work actually adds to the noir fog of the narrative in an interesting way as translation is a major theme in the novel. The detective is accompanied on her journey by a translator (several archetypal characters here, as well as the husband and vanished wife, though the principal characters have a far more emotionally complex execution than simple archetypal stand-ins) and muses on the concept that they are ‘tongue to tongue: a speaker of their tongue who would translate everything into my tongue’. The pair quickly realize that her ‘tongue’ is also not the ideal mode of communication between them and they settle for a neutral, third language in which they are both comfortable speaking. The wonderful translation by Suzanne Jill Levine and Aviva Kana also serves as a reminder that we, like the detective, are receiving the narrative through a filter of translated language.

In fact, the various filters of reality--like the fog in a noir--become a constant reminder of how we view the world through windows of social constructs.Windows figure as a prominent motif in the novel: what we see from the safety of looking out and what sees us in the wild looking in. ‘The rectangle is often a sacred shape,’ the unnamed detective says, the window that encloses, boxes us in, creates a fallible framework to enforce easy comfort. There is frequent mention of people being viewed through windows, literal or metaphorical--the runaway couple viewed as outside the “window” of the small village society, even the sex workers are said to be appraised by men through a viewing window. Throughout the novel, the narrator is pulled from the comforts of a modern society, a society led by the elbow--quite literally--by the grip of obdurate, masculine-enforced constructs and into an untamable wilderness where all the filters of “normalcy” fail to rationalize what she is to find. ‘It is difficult to describe what is impossible to imagine,’ she repeats multiple times, as the impossible becomes the unsettling reality that the narrator attempts to comprehend. Wolves might simply be feral children, miscarriages might become a fairy tale menagerie, impossibility might stare you in the face until the window of normalcy shatters.

‘But what is money even worth in the middle of a boreal forest? A mere hallucination.’

The windows keep out violence and viscerality, but also keep us couched in blandness as we submit to a capitalist system that thrives on our complicity. Even in the Taiga the power system exists. The narrator visits the local, wealthy businessman who feared the missing wife and her male companion as spies intent on dethroning him from power when they came to town. Through his window of social constructs he viewed any ‘other’, any ‘outsider’ as a threat (or possibly a spy for a rival lumber company). He has become another of the figurative “wolves” in the story, so corrupted by money that he’s cut off humanity in fear of someone plotting to hurt his wealth.

Even the wilderness is being leashed by capitalism. The narrator detective muses on the livelihood of the lumberjacks and how their profits have tainted the purity of the chaotic forests. They enter the forests for their ‘daily survival’, and therefore ‘the needs of the lumberjacks had, in turn, brought cooks and merchants, usury and sex.’ Though this isn’t used as an argument against modernization, per say, it does show us how society tames us and cuts down our inner wilderness like a lumberjack clearing a forest.

The trees agree with me. In lumberjack’s pockets, in their gold teeth, in the chains that they wore around their neck, in their desire to leave forever, in their plans to return to some version of home that grew more remote the more they thought about it. Money shines with the patina of something sad or impossible. Something that should be condemned.’

The strive for money takes us further from nature into a prison of oppression and control where we can only look back out a window and fear the wilderness we have come from.

Perhaps the most important use of framing comes from the way that, instead of crafting the novel as a noir or fairy tale, Garza uses the elements of genre to frame her story. The elements are there, most notably the missing woman run off into the woods that seems to bridge both genres. Folklorist [a:Jack Zipes|41878|Jack D. Zipes|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1461762163p2/41878.jpg] once wrote that fairy tales are ‘a means to conquer the terrors of mankind through metaphor.’ Garza’s work aligns with this theory while occasionally feeling like it is the reversal by emphasizing the terrors of mankind as a metaphor for creating a fairy tale. The detective often reflects on the elements of fairy tales and how they interact with her own narrative, examining how the lack of food caused by social factors and oppression during the time the Grimm Brothers wrote Hansel and Gretel set the stage for the step-mother abandoning the children in the woods to not have to feed them anymore. The narrator suggests that framing the story as a cruel stepmother instead of the children’s actual mother was shielding readers from the harsh reality that parents under duress might actually sacrifice their children for self preservation. The forest is a cruel place and, even if we dress the human soul up in polite society, that violent wilderness is still inside. Garza has created a world with wolves lurking in all the shadows and reminds us that some wolves wear human skins.

In addition to framing the story in genre elements, Garza plays with a mixture of art forms by providing a suggested listening playlist in lieu of a soundtrack. While the playfulness and vivid imagery of the language already create a very sensory experience, combining it with music further amplifies the impression of immersing yourself in the forests of the Taiga.

‘All traveling’s a way to imagine having a home to leave or return to’ writes poet Brenda Shaughnessy. This line would make a fitting epigraph for The Taiga Syndrome, a novel of people escaping. Escaping life, society, reality, fleeing further and further, disappearing more and more. This is a novel about running, hiding, searching, about love and about the end of falling out of love. This brilliant, little novel put out but the wonderful Dorothy Publishing Project (check them out, easily one of the coolest small presses out there) is a surrealist romp that tantalizes as much as it terrorizes. This book creeps towards the precipice of trauma like dreams where you find yourself unable to scream, and by the time reality begins to crumble, the notion between what is real and what isn’t seems completely beside the point. Garza doesn’t just play with genre, she reconfigures them into a cocktail of her own design that you’ll be drunk off long after having drank the last drop.

⅘

‘Look at this: your knees. They are used for kneeling upon reality, also for crawling, terrified. You use them to sit on a lotus flower and say goodbye to the immensity.’

3.5