L\u00eda left Argentina, unable to remain with a family who, apart from her father Alfredo, were all content to move on when the local police closed the unsolved murder investigation. Now running a bookstore in Santiago de Compostela, Spain, L\u00eda corresponds with Alfredo via a postal locker, refusing to hear any news of the rest of her family.<\/p>\n
This silence is shattered when the eldest sister, Carmen, and her husband Juli\u00e1n turn up in L\u00eda\u2019s bookshop. Their son Mateo has disappeared, and they believe L\u00eda can help them find him. In the course of the conversation, L\u00eda learns that Alfredo is dead.<\/p>\n
Narration of the next section falls to Mateo, who has grown up with the family scar of the murder and dismemberment of an aunt he never knew. Despite Carmen and Juli\u00e1n\u2019s dogmatic efforts to impose a \u201cnormal\u201d family life on him, Mateo is defined by the inherited trauma of Ana\u2019s death. Urged on by his grandfather Alfredo, Mateo embarks on a pilgrimage that will be Alfredo\u2019s last gift to his family.<\/p>\n
The distinctive voices of each narrator represent one of the great successes of Riddle\u2019s translation. She deftly navigates a significant shift in style in the third section: this is narrated by Marcela, Ana\u2019s best friend, a retrograde amnesiac. Condemned to create no new memories after a statue fell on her head the day of Ana\u2019s death, Marcela\u2019s section is cyclical, returning again and again to her final memory: Ana dying in her arms. Yet everyone tells Marcela that this moment, in which her memory is forever suspended, cannot truly have happened.<\/p>\n
Next we hear from Elmer, the now-retired police officer assigned to Ana\u2019s murder case, whose investigations were shut down by a line manager keen to move on from a community scandal. Narration of the final chapters then returns to Ana\u2019s family: first her weak brother-in-law Juli\u00e1n, and then Carmen, a sister blinded by unquestioning religious faith. In a moving twist, the last words fall to Alfredo.<\/p>\n
Cathedrals is crime fiction with social comment. The characters\u2019 experiences are connected to the sociopolitical context in Argentina: the dictatorship is still fresh, and society has not broken free of its restrictions. Poverty is rising, and religious doctrine is a powerful means of keeping women in set roles, because in the Bible \u201c[n]o one cares about heroines, they care about mothers and wives.\u201d Those who think for themselves or break with expectations are ostracised.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
Pi\u00f1eiro takes on the institution of the Catholic church, describing its teachings as \u201cstories that do not stand up to the credibility we demand from any minor work of fiction\u201d, and exposing the hypocrisy of those who preach God\u2019s word as a way of hiding from their own sins. As the truth is revealed little by little, the most aberrant crime is reasoned away as part of \u201cGod\u2019s plan\u201d. How easy it is to hide a crime in a society that normalises gender violence, and how cruel it is to twist faith into some kind of moral immunity.<\/p>\n
With her characteristic edge-of-the-seat storytelling, Pi\u00f1eiro exposes not only the monsters we live among, but also the society that produces them. Yet she also tells a personal tale of loss, scars and kinship that shows humanity in the darkest of human experiences, and the dignity we can afford others by acknowledging our own failings.<\/p>\n
This article features references to books that have been included for editorial reasons, and may contain links to bookshop.org. If you click on one of the links and go on to buy something, The Conversation UK may earn a commission.<\/em><\/p>\n Helen Vassallo receives funding from the British Academy. She has previously collaborated with Charco Press on La Lucha: Latin American Feminism Today. <\/span><\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Cathedrals is the latest work by Argentinian crime writer Claudia Pi\u00f1eiro to be published in English by Charco Press, in a translation by Frances Riddle. The crime is the murder and dismemberment of 17-year-old Ana Sard\u00e1 30 years ago. Yet, as ever in Pi\u00f1eiro\u2019s work, nothing is quite what it seems. Each section is written […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-498","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/redzine.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/498","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/redzine.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/redzine.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/redzine.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/redzine.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=498"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/redzine.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/498\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/redzine.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=498"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/redzine.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=498"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/redzine.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=498"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"The](\"https:\/\/counter.theconversation.com\/content\/283183\/count.gif\")
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