It’s a thrilling thing, still, to read a book that is so full of female voices that it would fail the Bechdel test if the genders were reversed. While men inevitably appear in Claudia Piñeiro’s Time of the Flies, published by Charco Press and translated by Frances Riddle, their presence is always ancillary, in relationship to the women who drive its plot and describe its world.
But this isn’t a utopic portrayal of female friendship. The protagonist, Inés, has just been released from a fifteen-year prison sentence after murdering her husband’s female lover. She’s begun a new life as a fumigator in business with her best friend from inside—Manca, a private investigator—under the moniker FFF (for Fumigations, Females, and Flies). But she seems to be actively closing herself to intimacy with Manca, whose support and love is unwavering, tender, and respectful. As Inés attends to clients’ shower drains, her movements are haunted by the woman she killed and her memories of prison, which cast other inmates’ clammy skin in the language of persistent disgust—to the point that she may protest too much. She declares that she has “renounced motherhood” and has no relationship with her daughter, who sued for emancipation shortly after Inés was imprisoned. While Inés claims to be untroubled by the fact that she doesn’t fully understand her daughter’s motivations for cutting ties, the reader learns that her obsession with her husband’s infidelity had consumed her to the point that she never even noticed her fifteen-year-old daughter was nine months pregnant. The daughter, now grown, has almost miraculously found happiness, abandoned as she was by both parents, who were arrested when she was becoming a new mother. In another major plotline, Ms. Bonar, the novel’s antagonist, wants to murder a woman—though it’s unclear exactly who.
While these characters may appear to be divorced from the patriarchy, leading their own narratives, each instance of cruelty between the women seems to drip with patriarchy’s influence, contaminated with poison just as Inés poisons the pests that invade her clients’ homes (with the noted exception of flies). Inés appears to have been more obsessed with the concept of her marriage than filled with love for her ex-husband; her aversion to lesbian desire may be more of a reaction to taught conventions than an affirmation of heterosexuality; and her coldness towards her daughter seems to stem from her inability to receive what she needed from others. The driving action—Inés’s decision about whether or not to serve as Ms. Bonar’s poison supplier—moves forward because she needs money to pay a corrupt male doctor to perform a life-saving surgery on Manca. And a tragic story about a transitioning child carries with it the violence of TERF logic.
The relationship between patriarchy and female-on-female cruelty might feel more subtle, or even debatable, were it not for an interesting experiment enacted in the novel’s pages: a cacophony of arguing voices, framed like a Greek chorus of women, who explicitly judge its characters and events, placing them within the discourse of feminist thought. The chorus references Medea, foreshadowing yet more threats of female violence. Though, unlike in Euripides’s text, Piñeiro’s chorus does not speak with a singular voice—it is fractured and combative, summoning writers from Marguerite Duras to Judith Butler to Rosa Montero and Rebecca Solnit.
At times, Time of the Flies’ chorus doesn’t seem to justify its place in the narrative—the lists of questions and contradictory statements are rarely compelling unto themselves. But when its kaleidoscopic proclamations banish the idea that one cannot complain about motherhood—disproving the assumption that for all women, caretaking is an uncomplicated joy that is infinitely rewarding—or when they deconstruct the absurdity of excluding people from a movement that is built on tearing down systems of exclusion—then, the chorus feels revelatory.
Piñeiro herself is a feminist organizer in Argentina, and a vocal advocate for the legalization of abortion (which passed in Argentina in 2020). Her books are often deeply concerned with the female body and the degree of physical autonomy that her characters are able to exert. In that sense, it’s no shock that she chose to make Time of the Flies explicitly a part of the feminist conversation. But her choice also begs the question of what literature about women is meant to do—and reminds us that, even when the purported aim is to entertain, it’s almost impossible to not think about the way that a piece of art makes an explicit or implicit argument about women’s bodies. One of the best examples is, in fact, the Bechdel test: the now-famous tool that started as a jest in a comic strip but became an important rubric for portrayals of women in media because a rubric was needed. In a world where I’m still unpacking how everything I read and watched as a teenager—works that never claimed they were a part of the feminist discussion—shaped my expectations of a stranger’s right to comment on my physical appearance, it feels natural for a text to consider its own place in our culture’s broader conversation. Because whether intentionally or not, each text impacts our evolving definitions of gender and self all the same.
Moments of almost sublime sweetness carry the women through the novel’s webs of pain; Inés and Manca’s friendship is a wonderful study in how two people who understand each other’s traumas can give each other space without treating each other as damaged. Inés’s daughter, Laura, gives us an image of domestic harmony and care, a model of a hetero relationship built on respect in a book where many of the women never seem to have really seen what that looks like before. And through each character’s chosen names, the novel suggests a path by which women can call into being a new birth for themselves, a new identity of their own creation.
The novel’s main action moves with Piñeiro’s deft, practiced suspense, encouraging the reader to gulp down pages one minute and then lengthening moments into painful microseconds as her characters navigate panic-attack paralysis and an almost pathological need to evade their phones. Piñeiro is delightfully successful at marrying the joy of a crime novel with the intelligence, and deep characterization, of literary fiction—making Time of the Flies a fun and heartbreaking follow-up to the English translations of Elena Knows and A Little Luck, both also published by Charco Press. Frances Riddle translated those novels as well; her translation of Elena Knows was shortlisted for the International Booker Prize in 2021.
Here, Riddle’s work is fluid, magnetic, matter-of-fact, while remaining open to wonder. As the narrative moves between the first and third person, from character to character, each perspective is utterly persuasive in her hands, each voice distinctly engaging as it alternately overtakes the action.
Riddle’s treatment of doubt, or the need to erase it, is particularly interesting: the word “but” leads many sentences, as if obsessively modifying the narrator’s description, whittling it down in an attempt to get at something more accurate, more true. “I’m a very nervous woman, cold and calculating too…. Cold, calculating, nervous, anxious. But not sick,” Inés says of herself. “Hurt, suffering, damaged, betrayed, mistreated, played for a fool, yes. Not sick.” This syntactical pattern creeps into the third person of the more distanced narrator and the language of the chorus. When engaging with the idea of Medea, one choral voice argues for the character’s validity, saying, “it shows another side of maternity, domineering and destructive, but not necessarily ‘unnatural.’” Through the repetition of “but” and “but not,” the text explicitly rejects oversimplification and embraces contradiction. In the linguistic world that Frances Riddle creates, every understanding of gender roles or female traits is complicated, undermined, and enacted—all equally and simultaneously valid.
Inés’s argument for the majesty of flies—particularly bluebottles, the insects best known for their forensic utility, as they feed on the flesh of corpses—could be read as overbearing, or forced, but ultimately is so bizarre and even joyous that it won me over. And while we may wish to describe ourselves as tigers or lionesses, there is something fantastic about the ubiquity and tenacity of the fly—a creature for whom time is slowed down to such a degree that it can evade almost any swat, any attack, as it flits about the room, waiting to feast on those who have fought in vain to silence its buzz.
Copyright © 2024 by Liz Wood. All rights reserved.
