Review: Thursday Night Widows (Claudia Pineiro) Not too long ago (well, months, but ..) I read a book set in Argentina, and this one was subsequently recommended to me by a friend of my daughter who lives there. There is a mystery that pops out right in the beginning...what happened to the three men who died in a swimming pool in one of the ritzy private homes in Cascade Heights, a gated community outside Buenos Aires, and why is a fourth man so nervous watching that place that night? But really, this is an exposé of a time and place, an Argentina before and just after the fall of the Twin Towers, a time when the country was a "fast-decaying society", as José Saramago puts it. It expands outward like tendrils on a vine, exploring the four couples at the heart (the four men, all accustomed to spending Thursday nights together playing cards) and their "Thursday Night Widows" left to their own devices while their partners are out together. It is an affluent mini-world, but one with problems common to so many people/couples but also some certainly unique to them, the strivers in a society that is imploding. The narrator changes often, but most often it is Teresa, the wife of the man who was not among the dead. At the hospital where her husband is being treated for a broken leg, she expresses what could well be a judgment on the entire society and the individual lives that make it up: "...I felt for the first time that everything going on around me was more than I could take in." Psychologically intriguing, the human problems all come up against the cultural reality of the Western World, and you are left with the feeling that your world can be upended anytime, regardless of whatever you think you are doing to protect yourself. Dismay may be the operative word here, in this very good novel.

on the bench near the entrances