#BlogTour ‘Thursday Night Widows’ by Claudia Pineiro

About the book….

Three bodies lie at the bottom of a swimming pool in a gated country estate near Buenos Aires. Under the gaze of fifteen security guards, the pampered residents of Cascade Heights lead a charmed life of parties and tennis tournaments, ignoring the poverty outside the perimeter wall.

Claudia Piñeiro’s novel eerily foreshadowed a criminal case that generated a scandal in the Argentine media. But this is more than a tale about crime, it is a psychological portrait of a middle class living beyond its means and struggling to conceal deadly secrets. Set during the post-9/11 economic melt-down in Argentina, this story will resonate among credit-crunched readers of today

Huge thanks to Anne Cater of Random Things Tours for the blogtour invite, and publishers Bitter Lemon Press for my gifted paperback review copy of ‘Thursday Night Widows’ which is out now in paperback.

This is a gritty, noir-ish post millennial thriller, which, although it looks like a murder mystery, is far from limited to a ‘whodunnit’.

It is set in the Cascades, a gated community of exclusivity where those who live there feel they have it made. The Thursday night widows are the wives of the men who meet on weekly basis to play poker and shoot the breeze. Until the night that 3 of them become actual widows.

The sense of location is so important to the feel of this novel, it exemplifies a type of living that must be maintained at all costs, marking the difference between rich and poor .Those who achieve it can never lose that status.

The details of their lives are planned to the minutest level, down to whether they can hang curtains in their residences. It is about a system that allows these individuals with means to do so to ascend to the likes of the Cascades, the people who sell this dream and what they will do to stay there. One of the women, Maria Virginia (known as Mavi) is a real estate agent who lives and sells the dream. Her family were only able to afford their house by the suicide of the previous owner and there is a glimpse into the mindset of the women who are adjuncts to the males in their life, when Mavi notes the marked down price she got by selling their ‘weekend getaway’ to afford the Cascade domicile.

Mavi takes part of the narrative as a first person perspective, however,it is also seen from the other wives’ perspectives in third party narration chapters, which caused me a bit of confusion in the ways she was referred to, and how she referred to herself. Her husband has been made redundant but whilst he indulges himself, she works hard to create this lifestyle where he can act the ‘big man’ and benefit from her earnings.

The back and forth nature of the tale would, I think, be better off told from a singular perspective. Just as you are getting to know one of the women, the story switches to another and it can get frustrating. There is a lingering sense of pushing the post 9/11 economy in Argentina that most readers would have quickly got, but this is followed up with reminders of this which can become a bit tiresome. The contrast between those who have and those who do not, is exemplified over and over by the expectation and exhibition of , their wealth.

This is seen in terms of how the household servants are treated and the renaming of adopted children in order to fit a certain perspective.

Overall I did enjoy it, it was not what I expected and was, I felt, a useful insight into a community that is isolated from the general populace, living a lifestyle most could only imagine. However, where they saw freedom to live like this, the reader is keenly aware that the gates hold the residents inside them, as much as it keeps others out.

About the author…

Claudia Piñeiro was a journalist, playwright and television scriptwriter and in 1992 won the prestigious Pléyade journalism award. She has more recently turned to fiction and is the author of literary crime novels that are all bestsellers in Latin America and have been translated into four languages. This novel won the Clarin Prize for fiction and is her first title to be available in English.

The Translator
Miranda France wrote Bad Times in Buenos Aires which in essay form won the Shiva Naipaul Memorial Prize in The Spectator magazine. A book by the same title was published in 1998 and met with great critical acclaim.
The New York Times described it as ‘a remarkable achievement’ and the Sunday Times as ‘an outstanding book’.

Twitter @claudiapineiro @bitterlemonpub @RandomTTours