On "Los abismos" (The abysses), by Pilar Quintana

This book also captivated me like a sweet but sour treat. I have to say that I found the first pages difficult to engage with, because the story was developing slower than I wanted. However, I kept going because I love stories written from a child's perspective, especially when they show how intelligent children truly are.

It is the kind of story that starts without introduction, unapologetic about the lack of clarity, you just have to stay still, drink your tea and figure it out, be attentive to form connections. It's a powerful narrative strategy, it is like peaking into someone else’s house and through the story, ending up being invited as a silent but trusted witness. I tried to search what was the name of this narrative technique, I guess the most close to is the in media res technique, but it doesn’t fit completely since the book doesn’t start right in the conflict, it is just that the scenes are presented in a very casual manner, like if you had always known the characters and their life stories.

“A veces, al caminar por el apartamento, me daba la impresión de que las plantas se estiraban para tocarme con sus hojas como dedos, y que a las más grandes, en un bosque detrás del sofá de tres puestos, les gustaba envolver a las personas que allí se sentaban o asustarlas con un roce.” (Quintana, 2021, p. 14) I think this must be the most quoted paragraph of the book. This paragraph is presented in the first pages. It is part of what made me stay. As any nature lover, I want to believe that plants can move to touch you, can have intentions and are able to show them.

The same paragraph translated by Lisa Dillman (2023, World Editions): “Sometimes, walking through the apartment, I’d get the impression that the plants were stretching out to touch me with leaves like fingers, and that the biggest ones, in a forest behind the three-seater sofa, liked to wrap themselves around the people sitting there or startle them with a brush.”

I appreciate also that the main conflict of the book is presented very early, in the first 10 or 15 pages, I believe.. I enjoy literature more when I know very little about the story before reading, so I was very surprised when I found that it was about infidelity. But mostly, about a child’s perspective on her mother infidelity. And even mostly, about the inner world of a little girl whose parents are not the perfect parenting role (as real parents are not), and she has to find her own certainties when grown ups provide none. His father lacks the expected vigor of masculinity, and her mother switches between honest intimacy (sometimes speaking to her daughter as if she was another grown up, letting her grow her own answers and opinions) and emotional distance and abandonment. Also fair to say that the book does explain that the detachment of the mother is a result of her own frustrations as a woman who was once a girl or a teenager that couldn’t take her own life decisions because the world is not made for woman’s free will.

So many things are so beautifully threaded in this book. The abysses are found in her mother’s depression, in a close relative suicide, in Lady Di and Natalie Woods car accident, in the solved mystery of the disappearance of her mother’s childhood friend, in the child’s own vertigo or pulse for standing at the edge of a hole. There is an emphasis on the abysses, in plural.

This book has so many things I can relate to. I was, as this girl, with a bigger understanding of the grown ups world. And, like for her, that understanding just brought a lot of questions. When I got to the end of the book, I felt sad. I wanted to go inside it, through the main door, and give that girl some stable company, make sure she finds her own strength and available resources to not host the abyss herself. I had to remember that it was only literature, but also I had to acknowledge that there are little children right now in this world, living with the abyss.

I took notes on almost every five pages of the book. It was hard to decide what I phrases I wanted to hold in my notes, because more than the finding enlightening phrases that contained a poetic vision or a clarifying true, I found dialogues and scenes that depicted what it means to be a little girl growing on a family that falls apart, where grown ups appear to have the answer but mix their own unresolved issues with reality and makes everything more confusing for children, who are constantly trying to make sense of the worlds.

Laura M. Cañas P. © 2025. All rights reserved.