Publisher's Synopsis
Ganador del Premio Pulitzer 2024 de Memoria o Autobiografìa
PRESELECCIONADA PARA EL NATIONAL BOOK AWARDS EN LA CATEGORIA DE NO FICCIÓN
Incluido en los libros de ficción notables del New York Times de 2023
Este libro es para celebrar el paso de Liliana Rivera Garza por la tierra y para decirle que, claro que sì, lo vamos a tirar. Al patriarcado lo vamos a tirar.
&«El 16 de julio de 1990, Liliana Rivera Garza, mi hermana, fue vìctima de un feminicidio. Era una muchacha de 20 años, estudiante de arquitectura. Tenìa años tratando de terminar su relación con un novio de la preparatoria que insistìa en no dejarla ir. Unas cuantas semanas antes de la tragedia, Liliana por fin tomó una decisión definitiva: en lo más crudo del invierno habìa descubierto que en ella, como bien lo habìa dicho Albert Camus, habìa un invencible verano. Lo dejarìa atrás. Empezarìa una nueva vida. Harìa una maestrìa y después un doctorado; viajarìa a Londres.
»La decisión de él fue que ella no tendrìa una vida sin él. Hace apenas un año decidì abrir las cajas donde depositamos las pertenencias de mi hermana. Su voz atravesó el tiempo y, como la de tantas mujeres desaparecidas y ultrajadas en México, demandó justicia.
»El invencible verano de Liliana es una excavación en la vida de una mujer brillante y audaz que careció, como nosotros mismos, como todos los demás, del lenguaje necesario para identificar, denunciar y combatir la violencia sexista y el terrorismo de pareja que caracteriza a tantas relaciones patriarcales».
"¡Enorme! ¡Ojalá millones lo lean!" - Francisco Goldman, autor de Monkey Boy, finalista del Premio Pulitzer de Ficción 2022
ENGLISH DESCRIPTION
Winner of the 2024 Pulitzer Prize in Memoir or Autobiography
LONGLISTED FOR THE 2023 NONFICTION NATIONAL BOOK AWARDS
Listed as one of The New York Times' Notable Fiction Books of 2023
A haunting, unforgettable memoir about a beloved younger sister and the painful memory of her murder, from "one of Mexico's greatest living writers" (Jonathan Lethem).
Can you enjoy yourself while you are in pain? The question, which is not new, arises over and over again during that eternity that is mourning.
In the early hours of July 16, 1990, Liliana Rivera Garza was murdered by her abusive ex-boyfriend. A life full of promise and hope, cut tragically short, Liliana's story instead became subsumed into Mexico's dark and relentless history of domestic violence. With Liliana's case file abandoned by a corrupt criminal justice system, her family, including her older sister Cristina, was forced to process their grief and guilt in private, without any hope for justice.
In luminous, poetic prose, Rivera Garza tells a singular yet universally resonant story: that of a spirited, wondrously hopeful young woman who tried to survive in a world of increasingly normalized gendered violence. It traces the story of her childhood, her early romance with a handsome-but possessive and short-tempered-man, through the exhilarating weeks leading up to that fateful July morning, a summer when Liliana loved, thought, and traveled more widely and freely than she ever had before.
Using her remarkable talents as a scholar, novelist, and poet, Cristina Rivera Garza returns to Mexico after decades of living in the United States to collect and curate evidence -handwritten letters, police reports, school notebooks, architectural blueprints- in order to render and understand a life beyond the crime itself. Tracing the full arc of their childhood and adolescence in central Mexico, through the painful and confusing years after Liliana's death, Rivera Garza confronts the trauma of losing her sister, and examines from multiple angles how this tragedy continues to shape who she is-and what she fights for-today.
