The Iliac Crest

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The Iliac Crest is a novel by Mexican writer Cristina Rivera Garza. It first appeared in Spanish in 2002 as La Cresta de Ilión and was translated into English by Sarah Booker in 2017.

What the story is about
- An unnamed man wrestles with questions about gender, identity, sanity, desire, fear, and freedom. Three women tell him he is a woman, but he tries to prove otherwise.
- The book opens on a stormy night when a woman named Amparo Dávila comes to his house. He is drawn to her hip bone, the iliac crest, and she claims he used to be a tree.
- A second woman, called the Betrayed, arrives later. Amparo cares for her and writes about her disappearance. The two women seem to speak their own language built around the sound “glu.”
- The narrator works at Serenity Shores Sanatorium and grows suspicious. He drugs Amparo to try to learn more. He recalls a man at the hospital who urged dying patients to choose death, who then killed himself. Amparo says she hasn’t written since that day.
- He searches the hospital archives, finds a man named Juan Escutia, and discovers Amparo’s lost manuscript. He doesn’t tell Amparo what he has found.
- Amparo later tells him that he is actually a woman. The narrator’s grip on his own body and identity begins to slip.
- He spends time with two archive workers, then tries to contact the real Amparo by phone. He meets the True Amparo, shows her the manuscript, and she says the False Amparo is one of the Emissaries.
- The True Amparo seems unsure of who she is. The narrator remembers being a tree and faces a sense of disappearance. He ends up in the hospital and then returns home.
- The False Amparo’s face fades from his memory, but he recalls the hip bone’s name: iliac crest (ilium). The story ends with more questions than answers about who is real and what the Emissaries are doing.

Who wrote it and why
- Cristina Rivera Garza is a professor of writing at the University of California, San Diego. She has said she spent years studying the files of a large insane asylum, and that influenced how she writes about sanity and madness in this book.
- She uses the real writer Amparo Dávila as a character. Dávila’s unsettling and ambiguous style helps Rivera Garza challenge ideas about truth, gender, and “normal” writing.

About the translation
- The English version was translated by Sarah Booker, a PhD student who translates Spanish and Portuguese works. She notes that some nuances about gender in Spanish are hard to carry into English, where gender language is less explicit.
- The novel has also been translated into Italian (2010 by R. Schenardi).

Reception and impact
- Critics have praised The Iliac Crest as haunting and otherworldly, with a deep look at how people think about gender and reality.
- The book is noted for cleverly weaving in Amparo Dávila’s themes and for its unusual, boundary-crossing storytelling.
- It was the runner-up for the 2003 Rómulo Gallegos Iberoamerican Award.