Cathedrals by Claudia Piñeiro (translated by Frances Riddle)

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.

A Little Luck by Claudia Pineiro (translated by Frances Riddle)

As someone who now lives far away from my region of birth, I find stories about characters returning to their origins especially poignant. In “A Little Luck” Mary Lohan returns to the Buenos Aires suburb of her early life after a twenty year absence. She has a new look, eye colour (with the aid of contacts) and name which is handy because she's desperate not to be recognized. Though she nominally goes for work she's also curious to reconnect with this place that she abruptly left under mysterious circumstances many years ago. This novel drew me in on multiple levels over the course of the story. Firstly, there's a compelling tension about what made Mary initially leave and what her relationship is with someone who recognizes her. This is enhanced by a short crucial scene from her earlier life which is described multiple times like a recurring nightmare. When the significance of this event is revealed it's truly shocking. Next there's the emotional connection I felt as we get Mary's full back story. It's truly heartbreaking and tragic as she was caught in a situation with no easy answers. And finally there's the larger meaning of the story which contemplates issues such as chance, the loyalty of family and the precarious nature of insular communities.

The circumstance Mary found herself in is so difficult because the choices she made are understandable but it led to a horrific accident. Because the community is wracked with grief it's easier to blame Mary and conspire against her rather than forgive her. It made me reflect on incidents from my own past which could have turned out very differently for better or worse. The story also asks a powerful question about how strong we are as individuals, as a family and as a community when we're tested by terrible circumstances. The relative success or failure of individuals is often due more to chance than willpower. Mary reflects how “Some mothers have all the luck; life never puts them to any kind of test. I only have a little luck.” It's poignant how the novel details how Mary's own mother was the victim of bad luck herself. Though she is severely tested, Mary also finds an opportunity to recreate herself with the help of another kind soul. While this story is centred around a tragedy it's beautiful how it also offers a hopeful message as she is able to survive the worst kind of loss.

Elena Knows by Claudia Pineiro (translated by Frances Riddle)

I can't think of another novel that has so deeply and intimately drawn me into the experience of someone living with a debilitating illness. Elena is in a late stage of Parkinson's disease where every physical action is timed around when her pills can be taken as these allow her a limited amount of movement. In the interim periods her body refuses to respond to messages from her brain and, even with the pills, normal actions which we take for granted are an enormous struggle. This is especially problematic as Elena is determined to visit someone on this day to call in an old debt. Her daughter Rita was recently found hanging in the belfry of a church. Elena doesn't accept the police's conclusion that it was a suicide and is determined to uncover the mystery behind her daughter's death. We follow her journey as she discovers the truth behind this tragic event and, in the process, get a profound insight into the challenges of her daily existence. However, this isn't a story that's as miserable as it sounds. Elena isn't the nicest person - often with good reason. She's irascible, extremely rude to some people and has a keen sense of irony. So following her thoughts and reflections is often a darkly funny and entertaining experience, but it's also very moving and enlightening. All these elements make this a riveting, revelatory and brilliantly imaginative story. 

Though Elena is only 64 years old she has the appearance of someone much older. She's unable to fully lift her head so that in the course of her journey our perspective of the world is limited to only what she can see. Usually this is people's shoes or the ground. This is one of the ways this narrative locks the reader so fully into her experience. At one point before her death, her daughter demanded she go to a beauty salon and, during the course of a pedicure, the beautician suggested she regularly use a cream on her feet. However, “she wasn't willing to add any more chores to the unending list of daily challenges: walking, eating, going to the bathroom, lying down, standing up, sitting in a chair, getting up from a chair, taking a pill that won't go down her throat because her head can't tip back, drinking from a straw, breathing. No, she definitely wasn't going to put calendula cream on her heels.” At almost every point in the story we're made aware of how all these necessary actions which most of us perform unconsciously require a big effort on her part because of the limitations her illness imposes. She comes to think of her disease as a separate entity in itself which she describes in the most disparaging and vicious terms like a hateful neighbour that has taken control and resides within her body.

There are so many lines in this book which made me attentive to aspects of physical existence which I normally don't consider. For instance, Elena observes how “She'd never had to think about her neck, about her eyebrows, to wonder whether they were muscles or flesh, or just skin, and she doesn't know what they are, but they hurt.” It's almost surreal how her illness makes her hyper-aware of things she hadn't previously considered so that her own body reveals itself as a foreign landscape. The story also gives an insight into the tremendous burden Elena's illness causes for the people around her. Before her death, Rita was Elena's full time carer assisting her with feeding, bathing, going to the bathroom and almost every daily action. This put an enormous mental, physical and financial strain on their relationship and Elena comments about how much they bickered. Rita also possessed some conservative values which caused conflicts and harm to people she encountered. I appreciated how the novel sympathetically shows the strenuous challenges Rita faced and the difficulty this caused in her relationship with her mother while also acknowledging her foibles at the same time. It's a tragic situation, but it's meaningful how Elena doesn't perceive herself as a victim and how she's committed to living though her illness has severely reduced the quality of her life. This is an example of a novel whose impact and meaning will continue to resonate with me for many years.