Books in Review are denuded. She shatters her constructed marital idyll, revealing her dead husband as a controlling megalomaniac, given to cruel condescension and predatory engagements with his young assistants. The literary pursuit of this suburban New England septuagenarian widow becomes a channel for the undulations of her unquiet mind, an attempt to preserve the passing of her ungrieved life. “That was what I meant to write all along–my story, my last lines. My name was Vesta,” she writes, eerily replacing Magda’s name with her own. Written and shelved in 2015, the novel emerges from the drawer at a time when isolation is the mechanism of daily affairs, uncannily reflected in the distanced and misanthropic Vesta who is steeped in several layers of self-imposed isolation. Death in Her Hands is not a book of answers; reading it in the midst of social loneliness generates great excitement but little comfort . Typical of Moshfegh’s novels, this one is just as unpredictable and sparks in its readers a confused curiosity as it hiccups along a hallucinatory trail. Vesta wants to insist on life, and for a while the novel pretends to share her insistence. But it resolutely refuses to allow her any safe harbor, which is perhaps its most brutal inclination. She is betrayed by her two companions (her husband and her dog); the narrative strongly hints that the note—the fount of Vesta’s artistic obsession —is only a prop from a detective game her dying neighbor is playing. “Don’t you know there is no life after death?” she is asked, puncturing the aorta of her literary memorialization. Moshfegh toys with the possibility of suggesting art as an antidote to death and oblivion; after all, Vesta is given a book to aid her in her mourning. But this life buoy is quickly yanked away the moment we get too comfortable in the safety of that idea. Cruelty is Moshfegh’s sleight of hand. Ashmita Chatterjee Kolkata, India Guillermo Arriaga Salvar el fuego Miami. Alfaguara. 2020. 659 pages. GUILLERMO ARRIAGA’S Salvar el fuego has garnered him the prestigious Alfaguara Novel Prize for 2020. A major figure in Mexican cinema, Arriaga is an internationally recognized screenwriter, director, and producer. Salvar el fuego, his most ambitious fiction, contains many of the themes as well as the narrative techniques that characterize both his films and previous novels. Salvar el fuego has four main characters: Marina Longines, a wealthy and ostensibly happily married woman with three children who is a choreographer and owns her own dance company; José Cuauhtémoc Huiztlic, a man imprisoned for killing his father, who was a distinguished indigenous scholar; Francisco Cuitláhuac Huiztlic, José’s brother; and El Máquinas, an elite hitman for a drug cartel, whom José meets in prison when he is serving a sentence for killing his father. Once he has done his time, José looks up his prison buddy who, when José becomes hospitalized with serious infections from insect bites, gets his cartel boss to pay for his treatment. This act precipitates events that lead to José killing of a young hired assassin and a police commandant, actions that earn him a trip back to prison with a fifty-year sentence. Marina is close to a wealthy gay couple, Pedro and Hector, who are patrons of the arts. They sponsor cultural events and literary workshops at the prison where José is serving his sentence. They invite Marina to have her company present their work there, where she meets and falls in love with José, something that rips her from her comfortable upper-class life and stable marriage and threatens her existence. Through these characters, the novel lays bare the gulf that exists in Mexico between the wealthy and poor and the lack of justice and opportunities for the latter. At the beginning of the novel, José describes Mexico as a nation divided between the haves, who live in fear they will lose everything they have, and the have-nots, who live in rage for what they do not have. The scourges of political corruption, machismo, and the violence fueled by the drug trade also receive treatment in the novel. In Salvar...