Elena has Parkinson’s disease. The reader is educated on the horrors of the disease. Elena’s life revolves around her three pills a day. The story is structured about her medication: Morning, Midday, and Afternoon. These pills are the only thing that can make her body move. I was anxious waiting for her medication to take effect. Elena is on a mission: her daughter Rita died under suspicious conditions at her Catholic Church (she was found hung in the church belfry). Elena KNOWS that Rita would never go into the church when it’s raining. There’s no way she went there of her own free will. Her opinions falls on deaf ears. Her dialogues with the local priest made me so angry. When Elena informs the Priest that she KNOWS that Rita didn’t go into the church on a rainy day, the priest declares Elena of the “sins of pride and arrogance, to think that you know everything, even when the facts show something else.” Pineiro shows the duplicity of the catholic church. The doctrine of the church worms it’s way into people’s minds. Elena notes that Rita and her middle-aged boyfriend seem to rigidly accept the church’s doctrines to the extent of imposing the doctrines on strangers. Pineiro writes Rita and Roberto are “united by their convictions about how another person should experience something they themselves had never experienced”. In fact, one theme is about not really knowing what you would do under a particular situation until it happens to you directly. “The Church condemns any wrongful use of the body that does not belong to us, whatever name you want to give the action, suicide, abortion, euthanasia”. The Hummingbird by Sandro Veronesi, translated by Elena Pala, is published by Weidenfeld & Nicolson.

What do people who don’t have daughters to cut their toenails do, Rita? They let them get long and filty, Mum.” chapter 3, section IDo you have a mother-daughter relationship in your life? How do you view the complexities, the oppositional forces, the agreements and the disagreements? The love and the discord? What do you do out of obligation for the existence of the relationship? What do you do out of caring for the relationship? How do these acts differ? Perspective I do want to live, you know? In spite of this body, in spite of my dead daughter, Elena says, crying, I still choose to live, is that arrogance? Not long ago I was told I was arrogant. Don’t keep the names other people give you, Elena.

It’s about asking who are the transparent ones in a country, and who makes them transparent,” he says. “Who are the transparent people in Syria right now, in Palestine, the US? Why do politicians not see specific groups of people?”

Translated from Spanish (Argentina) by Frances Riddle (Charco Press, 2021)

Translator Frances Riddle has translated many Spanish authors including Isabel Allende, Claudia Pineiro, Leila Guerriero, Maria Femanda Ampero and Sara Gallaro. She’s originally from Houston, Texas and lives in Buenos Aires. A bit of history on Pineiro, she was part of the activism that changed the abortion law in Argentina. In 2021 abortion became legal for the first time since 1886. She mostly known as a crime writer. She also was instrumental in the movement against femicide. for twenty years you’ve believe something so different to what I believe. I’ve lived my life and you’ve lived yours, we’ve both constructed that past, that day, as if we weren’t both there in the same place at the same time.” chapter 2, section III.

My only qualm was the ending felt rather abrupt. Though I see why the author ended it there and I think with time to process it, I think the ending works. Some months ago her daughter Rita, aged 44, was found hanged in a church tower. Everyone is convinced it was suicide but "Elena knows" it can't be, as it was a stormy day and her daughter, with a strong phobia of lightning, never went close to the church building in such weather.

I’m something else, something that doesn’t have a name, someone she cares about like you might care about a friend, or a neighbour or a roommate or travel companion. But that’s all we are. Travel companions. I don’t know what it feels like to be a mother, Elena, can you tell me?” chapter 2, section III. Since Rita's death Elena has been urging the police to investigate, and providing her own evidence (such as her daughter's diary and knowledge of her movements in the previous days) and list of suspects. On the day over which the novel is set she is travelling to Buenos Aires to visit a woman Isabel, who she hasn't seen for 20 years but is convinced may help solve the murder.