Cathedrals by Claudia Piñeiro

Argentine Fiction

Original title- Catedrales

Translator – Frances Riddle

Source – Subscription book

I start this year’s Women in Translation Month with a writer who, over the last couple of decades I’ve been around blogging and talking about books, shows how a writer’s whole view in the reading public’s eye can change. Piñeiro is a writer I first came across when I was on the Bitter Lemon Press small-crime-in-translation list.  Whether it was Bitter Lemon being seen as a crime publisher.  They do mostly Detective fiction in translation.  Bitter Lemon Press released Piñeiro in 2009, and a few years later I bought All Yours by her.  So when Elena Knows earned a long listing and a shortlist for the International Booker, I said at the time that Charco Press had repositioned her as a writer more toward psychological fiction. For me, See is up there with the great psychological writers like Patrica  Highsmith.  For me, in particular, the Roman Durs of Georges Simenon come to mind.

I asked Ángela to show me the books he’d ordered.

She told me that only one of them was here; she’d sold the other one after so many days had gone by. She showed me the one we still had: The God Delusion, by Richard Dawkins.

‘Do you remember what the other one was?’

‘Yeah, of course, Cathedral, by Carver, she replied.

Hearing that title made my stomach lurch, just like it had that afternoon when a customer came in smelling exactly like my father, If the boy shows up here again, let me know, please, 1 practically begged her.

‘Is there something I should know?’ Ángela asked,

startled.

‘Nothing important. He’s the son of someone I know

and they can’t find him.’

‘Alright, don’t worry, I’ll let you know, Lía?

Just as Mateo gets to her shop the mention of the Carver story

The book Cathedrals now resembles one of those puzzles you must assemble to see the full picture. It follows the fallout of a death in a family. The book comprises six chapters and an Epilogue. It traces the events in a family after someone kills and dismembers AnaSardá at seventeen.  The author reveals why this vicious killing occurred and what caused it. The book opens in Barcelona, with Ana’s sister Lia, who had to escape what happened and left her home in Argentina and escaped to Barcelona and is running a book shop in the great Cathedral of Santiago de Compostela only keeping touch via the occasional but the past catches up with theer when her other sister appears in her bookshop and is searching for her soon that had gone missing on a tour of Europe Cathedrals and they think Lia knows what has happened to Mateo their son.  He has grown up in a family broken by the violent death of his aunt.  He was pushed into the trip by his grandfather to see the cathedrals of Europe.  A statue struck Marcella, and the memory of Ana’s death haunts her.  Thus, the book continues with three more tales from people connected to the death.  Each tale drops a little crumb more.

Thirty years ago, the body of my aunt Ana, the youngest of the three Sardá sisters, was found burned and cut into pieces in a dump. Ana was only seventeen. Lía, nineteen.My mother, twenty-three; the same age I am now.

Lía looked to be agile and hard working. Seeing her climb up and down the steep ladder to get the book a customer had asked for, suggesting other titles, laughing in the middle of her conversation, I saw that some of her gestures were identical to my grandfather’s, and that was encouraging. When I got back to the hostel, I inspected my face in the bathroom mirror. I was looking for some similarity to Lía. I looked again at the photo of her on the internet. Maybe the hair colour, maybe the almond eyes. Even though mine are blue, like Ana’s. Any time someone says it, I get the mental image of her eyes in a head that was cut off from the body it belonged to.My mother’s eyes are blue, but different, colder, more transparent. But everyone has always told me I was the spitting image of my father. It would be a relief to find some proof that I’m not, or, at least, that I’m not only that.

Mateo talking about his mother and dead Aunt

I mentioned at the start of this post that I felt Piñerio is more than a crime writer.  I mentioned Georges Simenon as a writer I felt she was like.  Piñerio has mentioned him in interviews as a writer she liked, especially his Roman Durs.  This book also, at its heart, is a question around the Catholic religion and how it can make people into monsters, as the book slowly shows how Argentina viewed women within society and their roles within families. The book also references the short story of Raymond Carver of the same title. I read this as well, and I can see why it is mentioned: a blind man gets a sighted man to draw a cathedral for him.  The sighted man then goes a little over the top as they both see this cathedral drawn.  But it is the sense of blind faith and how we see things and how we view the world in a way that both stories share.  The ghost of a dead girl: how each sister had taken her own path after that death; one ran away and hated god. The other was drawn into religion even more. A story that lasts if you like tales that slowly burn, slowly unwind, that have how we view Morality, the church and family; this could have easily been set in de Valera Ireland. Have you read this or any other books by her? I have a few others to read !