Las viudas de los jueves by Claudia Piñeiro

It's certainly a very critical look at a what we might call a Second World country where political powers are corrupt and controlled by the men with money. For instance I found it hard to keep track of the four families that she was following - delving in deep into their different stories, how they ended up at Cascades Heights, their current state of employment or not as Argentina loses credence with the countries it exports to the desire to have American dollars in the bank, rather than pesos etc. The more I think about his, the more problems appear. I can only guess that she has good old Marxist leanings and would like us all to be more socially evolved - and democratic etc. So much of Piñeiro's writing reads as an attack on the rich, the super-rich, but it comes across as petty, bitchy, mean and ultimately boring. This is a system similar to that used on the pampas to stop cattle escaping.

In Cascade Heights it is against the regulations to enclose a property with anything other than plants, but plants are no match for canine exuberance, so some time ago invisible fencing started to catch on. She goes into the details of politics, economics, social and class divisions - basically a whole dissection of the modern country - and wraps her framing story - the crime scene around her main interests which form the bulk of the book.īut no one comes to live thirty miles outside Buenos Aires in order to keep their dog shut up as though it were still in a city apartment, or attached to a chain, however long. Piñeiro is exhuming all the disasters of modern day Argentina from the 1990s through to her final historical reference - the bombing of the Twin Towers September 2001. Whilst I was reading a long chapter on the 'types of dogs' you would find in this sort of community - I finally got it. So about 90% of the book is involved with background - even including the environmental development of the enclosed site from its origins as a marsh ground to its pristine lawns, golf course and individual mansions plus swimming pools and invisible hedging. They all live in a luxury, secure, gated-community, The Cascades, 30 kilometres from Buenos Aires.

This one opens with the crime more or less committed and hastily retreats back a decade in order to explain the characters involved and their particular lifestyle. She's very popular in Argentina, her native country and is known for her crime fiction. Not available yet on Internet Archive, so I chose this instead to get a taste of her work. So, I chose this because Piñeiro's Elena Knows is shortlisted for the International Booker Prize, '22.

Las viudas de los jueves by Claudia Piñeiro