One storm-thrashed night, a woman arrives at his door, trembling and disconcertingly lovely. He lives alone in a forbidding house, on a wild spit of land somewhere near the ocean, on the border of two nations. No one clings to his manhood more ardently than the narrator of “The Iliac Crest,” a physician at a state-run sanatorium. They destroy the identities-man, woman-worshipped by rulers. In Rivera Garza’s fiction, quests for desirable bodies do not destroy cities. To his wandering mind, “Iliac” summons Ilion, Homer’s Troy-a city destroyed because one selfish man desired one beautiful woman. “From there, from Ilion, from her crest, Odysseus departed on his return to Ithaca after the war,” thinks the narrator of “ The Iliac Crest” (2002), the second novel by the Mexican-born writer Cristina Rivera Garza. Skimming her breasts, her ribs, her navel, it comes to rest on her iliac crest, the bone that wings its way across the hip. The eye seeks the point that balances her movement. She has neither head nor legs her body reclines with its elbows raised and one arm flung across her neck, her back arching into the air. The “Torso of Adèle” is among the smallest and most sensual of Auguste Rodin’s partial figures.
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