FICTION
No Place to Bury the Dead
By Karina Sainz Borgo; Translated by Elizabeth Bryer
Harpervia
Published December 10, 2024
Lost in the Violence of the Borderlands: “No Place to Bury the Dead”
Karina Sainz Borgo’s No Place to Bury the Dead, translated from the Spanish by Elizabeth Bryer, is an unnerving, violent tale of the borderlands. Drawing from real accounts of the migrant crisis, from the dangers of border crossings, to the cruelties desperate people will inflict on themselves or each other to survive, to the dozens of horrific ways that power-hungry criminals take advantage of their desperation, the novel tells the story of a purgatory where no one wants to stay but no one can leave, where disorder and violence is inevitable, where just burying your loved ones is considered a privilege.
When the plague of memory began in the eastern mountains, Angustias escapes with her infant twins and dedicated husband. But by the time they make it to the border, her husband is sick, and her babies are dead. In her grief, she makes her way to a local saint of sorts, Vistiación Salazar, a talented mortician who lays locals to rest in her cemetery. Unable to leave her infants’ grave, she becomes Vistiación’s assistant-of-sorts, bearing the woman’s larger-than-life moods—and becoming mixed up in her bad blood with wealthy landowner Alcides Abundio.
The unfurling of this bleak world is promisingly twisted. A mysterious illness of amnesia is teased. Vistiación stands tall as a pillar, rough around the edges and strange, but determined to give dignity and respect to those who die here, bragging about her still-active sex life at 60 while going into the prisons to preach to young women. Angustias tags along beside her, sometimes helping and sometimes irritating, and so she becomes part of the fight when Abundio decides he wants to take over the land of the cemetery once and for all for his own nefarious purposes. The unhinged Críspulo lurks at the edges, a man seemingly driven by the desire to do violence; the Mayor trembles under Abundio’s thumb and wavers between his need to follow orders and his instincts toward leniency.
In Borgo’s world, the border becomes its own country. We never get confirmation of where they are; we never get a true picture of what crossing the border would achieve. Instead, we get a space in between, ruled by its own laws, isolated and bleak. Most of the characters seem to forget where they come from, and what they have to go to. Angustias is in a state of suspension, drifting, unable to move forwards or back; Vistiación shrugs off every threat, gunshot, and desecration as if tomorrow won’t bring her anything she hasn’t seen before. Borgo’s world is so saturated with violence that its own characters cease to fear it, and has the promise to explore what realms like this, heavy with politics of violence and power, can do to people, or what they can say about us as humans.
Unfortunately, the hardened dissociation of our characters becomes an out-of-time listlessness in the narrative itself. Angustias’ husband appears to be the only one affected by the supposedly deadly plague of amnesia, morphing a compelling speculative element into a character device. There are so many ways that memory could be an interesting device here—the closest it comes is when Borgo describes the ways that one reign of terror is written out of existence, swept under the rug—but the specter of the plague is notably absent except for where it impacts Angustias.
Most jarringly, early violence is played up for shock value only for later scenes with larger plot value, scenes of death and violence, to fizzle out. There is a lot of potential for exploring the ugliness that can be waged on desperate people; the way it can spread, warp, disease. Ironically, Angustias’ own detachment is part of the problem: she always stands apart from the other characters, judging, morally weighing their actions, as though she too wasn’t caught up in the fight to survive, as if she never in the course of this novel hefts a gun. When the conclusion seems to be that she wipes herself clean of this place, it reinforces the idea that she is apart, that the people of this place are twisted in some deeper way, rather than impacted by their circumstance and desperation.
When viewed in retrospect from her point of view, the violence and brutality of this border world begins to feel gratuitous. It wasn’t shown to us as readers to make a point about the way circumstances can warp, the way power can corrupt, but to show how one somehow pure figure can survive a flurry of twisted danger, as in classic Western style. While a book simply about survival can certainly be compelling, the beginning promises the reader something more, and when it doesn’t deliver, it’s harder to understand why the tortured, graphic scenes of violence were necessary. And so in a literary age where so many books explore the pains and tribulations of life at the margins in a way that is complex and fascinating, this one seems to lose its way.
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