Why do some men murder women?

First published in 2007, The red parts It is the chronicle of the trial of a case reopened thirty-five years after it remained unsolved: the murder of the author's aunt, something that, without having directly affected her when it happened, because she had not even been born yet, had always hovered like a ghost over the family, who could not find peace knowing that the murder of March 1969 was still at large. But Maggie Nelson is an author who is both too powerful and too subtle. to write only A legal chronicle: the book delves into intimate details of her childhood and youth, marked by other losses, pain, and a growing sense of bewilderment, and also rises into theory by proposing a series of highly pertinent reflections on the reasons for the collective obsession with the violent deaths of women. These three paths—chronicle, autobiography, and essay—intersect here and there, seemingly without order, on every page of the book, organically, as only a highly skilled hand knows how to orchestrate. And indeed, the author ofThe Argonauts, the book that would catapult her to fame a few years later —or, at least, as one of the icons of a new way of writing autobiographical essays— she was already successfully demonstrating here how to move elegantly and radically from literary theory to a small white box containing the remains of her deceased father's bones. This audacity comes naturally to her, and she masters literary tools with ease. If, in addition, the translation is impetuous and playful, as is the case here, the text becomes as captivating as the original.

There is yet another layer of varnish over this threefold nature of the book, and it is another book that functions almost like a phantom limb, one of those we have lost, but which continues to harm us if a change of time is to come, which ties in very well with the ghostly character of the dead aunt. When the police call came announcing the possible discovery of the real killer, Maggie Nelson had just published a book of poetry entitled Jane: a murderTo write it, she had spent five years researching dozens of archival materials about femicides at American universities. Mixing fragments of her aunt's diary entries with the results of this research, the book aimed to give voice back to a woman who had been silenced.

Questioning the Devotion to Cruelty

This silencing, which is always feminine, is another of the book's major themes, which can also be defined as one of the first severe warnings about the inherent machismo of the rise of true crimeDuring the testimonies of dozens of male witnesses—police officers and forensic experts—there is a key moment that Nelson describes as "the dawn of the twenty-first century": it is when the first woman takes the stand. A young doctor speaks of DNA evidence in a scientific, modern, and empathetic way, in contrast to the overly passionate manner in which a retired police officer describes the actions the killer must have taken to tear a pair of pantyhose. It is this passion, this devotion to cruelty, that Nelson places at the center of his always poisoned arrows of intelligence: Are we sure it's not a mistake to be so interested in the ways someone is killed? Are we sure this obsession is compatible with the compassion that the death of another human being should awaken in us? Are we sure we know which side we are on?

What the author wants to highlight is our society's inability to confront either the causes or the effects of violence against women, and where she delves most intently is into the contradictions experienced by all of us who, on principle, reject this violence, yet always want to know what went through the perpetrator's mind. Maggie Nelson's visionary honesty always catches us off guard, as readers. And it drags us down into a downward spiral, eyes wide open.