"Song of vespers": family wounds that expose Argentine political violence

"There is no greater hate than mother's hate," says one of the female characters before dying at the beginning of "Canción de vespers," a novel by Guillermo Cácharo where family ties come into conflict from the moment they a woman chooses to end her life with a phrase that exposes the complexity of motherhood, one of the derivations of this story where the political violence in Argentina is also visible.

The story of Cácharo, a graduate in Literature and also the author of the novel "Cronología de la furia", recounts the journey of a generation in which a father expels his daughter and where there are siblings in permanent discord. In another generation, the children seek to build themselves from the traumatic bond with their mother, marked, on the one hand, by the political violence of the 60s and 70s and, on the other, by the clash between the intellectual and the emotional. Somehow the family history could be seen as a correlate of the violence in those years and of a certain role of the intelligentsia.

Cácharo, author of two plays -"Memorándum" and "Silva en el espejo"- stages in this novel published by Azul Francia the voices of the different members of the family, which make up a plot that covers more than 60 years , from just before 60 until the beginning of the recent pandemic.