Abyss
by Pilar Quintana, translated by Lisa Dillman
(World Editions, ISBN 9781912987405)
As Philip Larkin famously wrote, ‘They fuck you up, your mum and dad. / They may not mean to, but they do.’ Eight-year-old Claudia, the protagonist in award-winning Colombian author Pilar Quintana’s latest novel, is a case in point. Her mother, obsessed with celebrity suicides and struggling with her own demons, is largely absent – if not physically, then certainly emotionally. Her father escapes into work and silence. When her parents do communicate with her, it is often with a casual cruelty and disregard for what their daughter might need or want to hear.
They live as an uneasy but functioning unit, until Claudia’s mother starts an
