First Impressions
I spent an entire weekend completely engrossed in this book! It's the kind of novel I kept returning to in every spare moment and staying up late until I'd finished it. At its centre is a genuinely gripping mystery: the body of a teenage girl is found not only dead but dismembered and severely burned. But what makes the novel so compelling is how much larger meaning it builds around that central crime. I won't give away any specifics of how things unfold, since I think that's best left for readers to discover for themselves, but I do want to talk about how cleverly and thoughtfully the novel is constructed, along with a handful of things about it that genuinely bothered me. None of that stopped me from being thoroughly absorbed in it, and I'd still highly recommend it.
Piñeiro is a prolific Argentinian author, and her novel "Elena Knows" was one of my favourite books the year I read it; I've also really enjoyed her novel "A Little Luck". In "Cathedrals," the narrative rotates between a series of different first-person perspectives, never repeating the same one twice, all circling the death of a teenage girl, Ana, killed thirty years earlier. We meet her family at a point when that loss has long since blown them apart. Ana had two older sisters: Carmen, the eldest, devoutly and strictly Catholic, and Leah, the middle sister, who was especially close to Ana. In the aftermath of Ana's death, Leah broke entirely from her family and from the Catholic faith she was raised in, moved from Argentina to Spain, and opened a bookshop there. She's stayed in contact with her father, Alfredo, over the years, but only on the condition that they never discuss anything happening within the family, so their relationship has narrowed down to conversations about books and literature. None of this is a spoiler; we're told all of it right at the start. The novel opens with Leah's point of view in Spain, where she's built an entirely separate life for herself, until an encounter with family members drags the past, and Ana's case, back into the present. What unfolds isn't suspenseful in the traditional whodunit sense so much as in the question of why, and how the actual events played out.
A Searing Critique of the Church
This reminded me of what I admired so much in "Elena Knows," where Piñeiro also builds an overarching mystery around a death while using it to explore much larger questions about religion and women's place in society. Here, the novel offers a genuinely searing critique of the church, less of religious faith itself than of how certain organised religions are actually run, and the traditional structures built up around them that can badly warp some people's capacity for empathy, pushing them toward judgment rather than openness, with real and sometimes extreme consequences for how they treat the people around them. It made me think of another novel I read recently, "A Private Man," which examines the Catholic Church through the lens of priestly celibacy; both books dig into the history and rules that shape religious life in ways I found genuinely illuminating.
Piñeiro is also excellent on the private architecture of families: the way people behave with each other inside the family unit versus how they're perceived from the outside. One sister here is publicly affable, someone everyone instantly likes and admires, while within the family she's seen as far more calculating, her warmth read as a kind of performance. I found the resulting friction between family members, and the real venom that surfaces between them, genuinely moving, and I got quite emotionally caught up in watching that side of the family reveal itself over the course of the book.
Where the Novel Strains
I did have a few real issues with the book. It leans a bit too heavily on coincidence in places, and the fact that this case is only being properly investigated thirty years later felt somewhat engineered to me; I kept wondering why certain conversations or investigations hadn't happened much earlier. Piñeiro does supply in-story justifications for these gaps, including a plot thread involving memory loss that edges close to soap-opera territory, but even with those explanations in place, it occasionally felt like the story had been built backward from the ending it wanted to deliver, rather than the reverse. That said, the drama it generates is genuinely effective. I was fully invested in wanting to know what had happened and why, and the ending landed for me in a way that felt truly rewarding.
The Cathedral as Metaphor
The novel's title carries real weight by the end. Leah lives in a Spanish city famous for its cathedral, and another family member travels through Europe visiting several famous cathedrals before eventually reuniting with her there. Piñeiro is careful to specify that this isn't a religious pilgrimage or an act of mysticism; it's closer to holding onto one's own sanity amid a kind of surrounding collective delirium. The cathedrals take on real emotional and symbolic weight for the family. In one striking detail, the cathedral in Leah's city turns out to be undergoing major renovation and is entirely covered, so visitors who've travelled specifically to see it can only experience it secondhand, through postcards and photographs.
The title also nods directly to Raymond Carver's short story ‘Cathedral,’ which Piñeiro references explicitly in the novel. Leah and her father Alfredo bond over literature, he mostly reads nonfiction but she's introduced him to fiction as well, and Carver's story comes to hold real personal significance for him. In Carver's story, a sighted man and his wife host a blind visitor for an evening; after they've smoked some marijuana while watching a television program about cathedrals, the sighted man struggles to describe what a cathedral looks like, so the blind man suggests they draw one together, his hand resting on top of the other man's as it moves across the page, a shared act that opens up an entirely new way of seeing for the man who could see all along. Piñeiro recreates a version of that same exercise between a grandfather and grandson in her own novel, carrying forward Carver's underlying idea about what we allow ourselves to truly see in other people, and what our own belief systems keep us from seeing, sometimes with devastating consequences for the people we're supposed to be closest to.
Verdict
"Cathedrals" tackles far bigger questions than its central case alone, even though that case is compelling in its own right. If you want a genuinely gripping story that also carries real weight and meaning, I'd recommend it highly, alongside "Elena Knows." Piñeiro is such a talented, thoughtful writer that I want to read even more of her work. I didn't love "Cathedrals" quite as much as "Elena Knows," but it's a strong, rewarding novel, and I'm glad I read it.
