#WITMonth: Claudia Piñeiro – A Little Luck

Claudia Piñeiro: A Little Luck, transl. Frances Riddle, Charco Press, 2023.

Image courtesy of The Big Issue

I’ve gone completely off-piste with my #20BooksOfSummer (as you’ll see when you look at the original list), swapping so many around that it would feel like cheating to include this one on the list. But it certainly fits with #WITMonth, it’s from one of my favourite publishers… and I’m beginning to realise more and more that Latin American literature is probably the style and subject matter that I feel closest to. Mircea Cărtărescu has a point when he says that we Romanians are closest in spirit to the Latin Americans (and, sadly, often in troubled history and social issues too).

I’ve been a fan of Claudia Piñeiro’s work for many years and have reviewed a couple of her books on here and for Crime Fiction Lover. However, she didn’t really hit the big time in the English-speaking world until Charco Press published Elena Knows, also translated by Frances Riddle, and the book got shortlisted for the International Booker Prize. I’m just glad that readers are beginning to realise that authors writing in the ‘crime fiction genre’ can be of literary merit – crime fiction is an extremely broad church and tells us so much about society and cultural norms.

In this book, there’s no murder, just an accident. A very unfortunate, tragic accident; the account of it is repeated throughout the book, each time with a bit more detail. The author uses this fatal accident to highlight the hypocrisy and judgemental nature of a smalltown community (although Temperley is a suburb of Buenos Aires, rather than a provincial town), as well as individual pain, guilt and remorse.

Marilé fled Argentina after the tragedy: the exact circumstances surrounding the accident and its aftermath, the pressures that led to her departure for the US are gradually revealed to us, but we know from the outset that this is her first time back in Argentina in twenty years. She is now the respectable teacher and school inspector Mary Lohan, twenty years older, with a completely changed appearance. She lives in fear of being recognised and reviled all over again, but it appears that no one does, even though she is inspecting the very school where her son was once a pupil. But the hardest thing of all is to confront the past herself, to come to terms with it, to be honest with herself about what is self-justification and what was inevitable.

The only person who showed her some kindness at the time was the director of the school, Mr Maplethorpe, now deceased. I couldn’t help thinking that the words he uses to encourage Marilé describe the current online communities quite well too:

Don’t let them define you… Some communities are very insular, very… judgemental. And a bit hypocritical as well, I have to say. People who don’t know how to put themselves in other people’s shoes. They point their finger and pass judgement, certain that they’ll never be seated in the same spot.

Whenever I read a book about characters who have taken a wrong turn, who are damaged or depressed or struggle in some way, all those characters that people call unlikable or like to harangue for their bad decision-making, I say to myself: ‘There but for the grace of God go I’. The line between good fortune and destitution, between happiness and despair, between good and evil is most often paper-thin for most of us, who do not have vast wealth to protect and insulate us. This is what Piñeiro make so clear in this novel:

If that tragedy had never entered our lives… I’d have passed the test like so many other women. I’m not saying I’d have got the best marks, maybe just barely squeaked by. But I’d have been there, being the only mother I could be. Motherhood is full of little failures that pass unnoticed. If circumstances had been different, no one, not even me, would’ve ever known who I could become.

Some mothers have all the luck; life never puts them to any kind of test.

I only have a little luck.

This is remarkably clever writing. Most of the book is told in the first person from Mary/Marilé’s point of view (there are also some letters written by other people), and therefore we are naturally led to sympathise with her and be moved by her predicament, and yet… we also feel that the narrator is stuck too much in the past, that hers has been a life half-lived, no matter how gentle and understanding her second husband Robert was. The conversations with Robert that she remembers are really all about convincing herself to move forward, but until she meets her son she is not really able to do so.

… the past can’t be changed, there’s no escaping it, no way to avoid it no matter which variables are altered… The only thing that isn’t fixed, Robert said, is what each person will do next… Not everyone is able to choose the best option, not all of us are prepared to. But, according to Robert, we have the rest of our lives to keep choosing, to either repair a mistake or forever seal off any chance of repair.

There is a nice reference in the book to Simone de Beauvoir’s The Woman Destroyed (I reviewed this not that long ago), a sly hint perhaps that the sympathy of close friends and even the kindness of strangers may be limited, but above all a reminder that the narrator is not destroyed, merely damaged, that there is still hope that she can ‘be repaired, wounds sewn up, scars healed’.

A wonderful, deeply moving book, which brought a tear or more to my eyes, most definitely a Keeper. My rainbow collection of Charcos is getting bigger and bigger!