A Little Luck by Claudia Piñeiro
An investigation into the limits of narrative, Claudia Piñeiro's latest cements the writer as a giant of Argentine literature
Mary Lohan has gone by many names. Twenty years after leaving Argentina, she has changed not only her name and profession but also her voice, the colour of her hair and her eyes. She seems to want nothing but to forget the life she left behind, but to her the past is like the abyss: it attracts as much as it repels.
Mary believes that grief of a certain magnitude can only be told in the first person – her unwilling return to Greater Buenos Aires is narrated in the form of a logbook – and, at a metatextual level, A Little Luck relies on the potential of this principle. This might be the novel's most notable achievement: successfully unveiling a story the narrator seems unable to put into words. Through a loosely epistolary structure, the details of Mary’s life and the tragedy that turned it upside down come to the surface like memories that can no longer be repressed.
An examination of the fine line between choice and fate, A Little Luck is an homage to oral storytelling as a tool to try to explain the unexplainable; from inconceivable pain to the nature of identity. It is a novel that further consolidates Claudia Piñeiro’s position in the pantheon of Argentine female authors that have become an unmissable staple of literature in translation.
