I start this year\u2019s Women in Translation Month with a writer who, over the last couple of decades I\u2019ve been around blogging and talking about books, shows how a writer\u2019s whole view in the reading public\u2019s eye can change. Pi\u00f1eiro is a writer I first came across when I was on the Bitter Lemon Press small-crime-in-translation list.\u00a0 Whether it was Bitter Lemon being seen as a crime publisher.\u00a0 They do mostly Detective fiction in translation.\u00a0 Bitter Lemon Press released Pi\u00f1eiro in 2009, and a few years later I bought All Yours by her.\u00a0 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\u00a0 Highsmith.\u00a0 For me, in particular, the Roman Durs of Georges Simenon come to mind.<\/p>\n
\nI asked \u00c1ngela to show me the books he\u2019d ordered.<\/p>\n
She told me that only one of them was here; she\u2019d 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.<\/p>\n
\u2018Do you remember what the other one was?\u2019<\/p>\n
\u2018Yeah, of course, Cathedral, by Carver, she replied.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
\u2018Is there something I should know?\u2019 \u00c1ngela asked,<\/p>\n
startled.<\/p>\n
\u2018Nothing important. He\u2019s the son of someone I know<\/p>\n
and they can\u2019t find him.\u2019<\/p>\n
\u2018Alright, don\u2019t worry, I\u2019ll let you know, L\u00eda?<\/p>\n
Just as Mateo gets to her shop the mention of the Carver story<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n
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 AnaSard\u00e1 at seventeen.\u00a0 The author reveals why this vicious killing occurred and what caused it. The book opens in Barcelona, with Ana\u2019s 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.\u00a0 He has grown up in a family broken by the violent death of his aunt.\u00a0 He was pushed into the trip by his grandfather to see the cathedrals of Europe.\u00a0 A statue struck Marcella, and the memory of Ana\u2019s death haunts her.\u00a0 Thus, the book continues with three more tales from people connected to the death.\u00a0 Each tale drops a little crumb more.<\/p>\n
\nThirty years ago, the body of my aunt Ana, the youngest of the three Sard\u00e1 sisters, was found burned and cut into pieces in a dump. Ana was only seventeen. L\u00eda, nineteen.My mother, twenty-three; the same age I am now.<\/p>\n
L\u00eda 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\u2019s, 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 L\u00eda. 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\u2019s. 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\u2019s 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\u2019m not, or, at least, that I\u2019m not only that.<\/p>\n
Mateo talking about his mother and dead Aunt<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n
I mentioned at the start of this post that I felt Pi\u00f1erio is more than a crime writer.\u00a0 I mentioned Georges Simenon as a writer I felt she was like.\u00a0 Pi\u00f1erio has mentioned him in interviews as a writer she liked, especially his Roman Durs.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 The sighted man then goes a little over the top as they both see this cathedral drawn.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 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 !<\/p>\n
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