“Abyss” by Pilar Quintana

*Translated from the Spanish by Lisa Dillman

This is the second of four books that ChatGPT chose for me from my TBR (and I have just now realized s/he—it?—must not have made it very far down the alphabetized list: the four books include one whose title starts with a number, and three whose titles start with the letter A. Lazy much? . . . says the girl who outsourced the choosing of her next books to read).

But I digress. I must confess that I was not super-excited about reading Abyss, as evidenced by the fact that we bought it more than two years ago and I hadn't touched it yet. In 2023, it was one of the five finalists for the National Book Award for Translated Literature and while on one hand I do believe this honor is bestowed on high-quality works, on the other hand I have the (possibly mistaken?) feeling that the finalists for this award are often so . . . worthy. (Yes, worthy of renown, but that's not what I mean in this case; what I really mean is too worthy: maybe a bit pretentious, maybe taking itself a little too seriously, maybe just too earnest. Maybe not very fun). 

I should not have had these fears about Abyss. This book was worthy only in the good sense. This is the story of eight-year-old Claudia, living in Cali, Colombia. She's the only child of her older, hard-working father and her young, beautiful, bored mother. Claudia watches the adults around her, half-understanding some of the things she sees and hears; she's more oblivious to other circumstances, but feels the undercurrents of tension anyway.

This tension is definitely passed on to the reader. The tightly-wound narrative gave me a near-constant feeling of dread (but the good kind). Without even meaning to, I read half the book the first night I picked it up. 

*I should be more diligent about noting information like this on my blog. I obviously have not read the book in Spanish so I can't compare the two versions, but I was impressed by the natural way Dillman preserved the childlike voice of the narrator.