The Taiga Syndrome by Cristina Rivera Garza review a fairytale quest

One of the greatest contemporary Mexican authors weaves a suspenseful fable around a search for a lost couple in the woods

An unnamed narrator travels to a forest – the subarctic taiga of the title is the only geographical hint we are given – to investigate a disappearance case. Her client asks her to find his wife, who has gone off with another man, but whose messages appear to suggest that she wants to be found. The woman’s photograph, with a forest in the background, reminds the narrator of the story of Hansel and Gretel, and although she is urged to treat this investigation as ‘a story about being in love’, it is fairytales that are on her mind as she follows the couple. She hires a translator to help, and they end up communicating in “a language that was not strictly his nor mine, a third space, a second tongue in common”. Again, we are left to imagine the rest.

When they get to a village where the fugitives stayed, eyewitness accounts sound so outlandish it’s tempting to blame the language barrier, but what the narrator sees with her own eyes is stranger still. The unfolding story defies traditional narrative, and to alert us to its surreality, an indirect mode is used throughout. “That we asked about them in every campsite we passed in the forest,” a typical paragraph begins, “I would write in the report that by now seemed more like an intimate diary than the kind of text that was meant to gather and provide precise and objective information.” The translators Suzanne Jill Levine and Aviva Kana stick to this technique, which has longer self-referential remarks punctuated with aborted sentences, all the better to keep us on our toes: “When I looked behind us, the world seemed incomprehensible and eternal. Time.”

The journey through the taiga – a place where feral children roam and drunk lumberjacks stomp around with torches – also takes us through several literary traditions. Considered one of the greatest Mexican authors writing today, Rivera Garza here interweaves suspense with poetry, creating a contemporary magic-realist fable that is both her own and draws on her predecessors. We are told that the tale of Hansel and Gretel, children lost in a cruel world, was even more brutal in its original oral version; a reminder that much of what we perceive as our cultural heritage is in fact a product of our collective imagination. That’s what literature is about for us all, readers and writers alike; a process of constant retelling, where originality lies not in the plot but in the ways it is reimagined by storytellers the world over.

The Taiga Syndrome by Cristina Rivera Garza, translated by Suzanne Jill Levine and Aviva Kana, is published by And Other Stories (£10). To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com or call 020-3176 3837. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99.

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