No political or economic system, however just and equitable, is likely to free us from the dominion of matter. But the fact that Weil’s philosophy does not easily lend itself to political application does not render it any less illuminating. And in Castellanos’s reading of them, Weil’s ideas do not lead to mere fatalism, but are a moral challenge—the only possible moral challenge. Each character in Castellanos’s novel, from the most powerful to the most abject, is simultaneously oppressed and oppressing, victim and perpetrator. It is very clear that some groups disproportionately bear the crushing weight of oppression, and it is their tragedy that moves Castellanos to write here. But she refuses to complete the work of oppression by reducing them to no more than the passive victims of might’s blind force. Each character wields power and cannot choose not to. Ulloa, who tries to evade the exercise of power out of an idea of democracy, finds that it cannot be evaded, and that in trying to do so he has simply abdicated his responsibility to stave off disaster. Even Cifuentes, whose sway seems virtually uncontested, reaches a point where almost everyone has turned against him and only the arbitrary and unforeseeable course of events saves him. Each character’s drama lies essentially in the nature of his or her relationship with the power all of them battle to wield. And the novel’s most ambitious, powerful, and devastating character is simultaneously one of its most oppressed, Catalina Díaz Puiljá, an Indian woman.

Catalina Díaz Puiljá takes on the dimensions of a great, tragic character because she makes a gesture—a gesture she was absolutely free not to make. She offers Domingo, the child she has raised since birth, as a sacrificial victim. And the choice destroys her. In the end, crushed under the weight of her own power, her own ambition, she is reduced to little more than an object, alien even to language. “That might which is wielded by men rules over them.” Castellanos leaves little doubt that this goes for women, too; she challenges our need to divide the world into easy categories of victim and victimizer. No matter who you are, Lamentations works at making you suspicious of the self-congratulatory note that sounds in your voice as you denounce those who oppress others, even as it compels you to denounce them.