Paul Fulcher's Reviews > Elena Knows

Shortlisted for the 2022 International Booker Prize

Now he understood her, who had lived beside him so many years and been loved but never understood. You were never truly together with one you loved until the person in question was dead and actually inside you.

From the epigraph, by Thomas Bernhard, Gargoyles, as translated by Richard and Clara Winston

'Elena Knows' is the translation by Francis Riddle of 'Elena sabe' by Claudia Piñeiro and published by Charco Press, whose mission "focuses on finding outstanding contemporary Latin American literature and bringing it to new readers in the English-speaking world. We aim to act as a cultural and linguistic bridge for you to be able to access a brand new world of fiction that has, until now, been missing from your reading list."

This is Charco's 25th novel - see here for my reviews of all of them: https://www.goodreads.com/review/list...

Piñeiro is best known as a writer of crime fiction, and four of her novels have been published in Miranda France's translation by Bitter Lemon Press, a London-based specialist in "high quality thrillers and other contemporary crime fiction books from abroad." As explained in an afterword by Dr Fiona Mackintosh, Charco Press, with this book, "intends to relaunch Piñeiro in English as a writer of ethical weight and commitment" and this book certainly does that.

The novel is narrated from the perspective of Elena, in her early 60s but suffering from Parkinson's Disease, a condition she refuses to accept as her having Parkinson's but rather personifies as her adversary, a "fucking whore illness".

Some months ago her daughter Rita, aged 44, was found hanged in a church tower. Everyone is convinced it was suicide but "Elena knows" it can't be, as it was a stormy day and her daughter, with a strong phobia of lightning, never went close to the church building in such weather.

No one knows as much about her daughter as she does, she thinks, because she's her mother, or was her mother. Motherhood, Elena thinks, comes with certain things, a mother knows her child, a mother knows, a mother loves. That's what they say, that's how it is. She loved and still loves her daughter even though she never said it, even though they fought and kept their distance, even though their words were like cracks of a whip, and even if she didn't hug or kiss her daughter, she felt a mother's love. Is she still a mother now that she doesn't have a child? If it had been her who'd died, Rita would have been an orphan. What name does she have now that she's childless? Has Rita's death erased everything she was? Her illness didn't erase it. Being a mother, Elena knows, isn't changed by any illness even if it keeps you from being able to put on a jacket, or freezes your feet so that you can't move, or forces you to live with your head down, but could Rita's death have taken not only her daughter's body but also the word that names what she, Elena, is?

Since Rita's death Elena has been urging the police to investigate, and providing her own evidence (such as her daughter's diary and knowledge of her movements in the previous days) and list of suspects. On the day over which the novel is set she is travelling to Buenos Aires to visit a woman Isabel, who she hasn't seen for 20 years but is convinced may help solve the murder.

Piñeiro's portrays Elena's symptoms in painstaking detail, her life and her tortuous journey to the capital regulated by the medication schedule for the levodopa pills she takes to control her symptoms and to allow her to function, the novel itself divided into three parts, Morning (Second Pill), Midday (Third Pill) and Afternoon (Fourth Pill) (the first having been taken on rising in the early hours).

And when Elena eventually reaches Isabel the women's conversation leads her to realise that she did know the truth of what happened to Rita all along.

Forwards and backwards and backwards and forwards, one, two, a hundred times, she wonders if she’ll be able to say her prayer for the dethroned king and the naked emperor, the messenger and the whore; the sternocleidomastoid, the substantia nigra, the whore, and the levodopa.

A powerful exploration of what it means to be a mother - are you still a mother if your daughter is dead; are you a mother if you never wanted to be a mother; and are you a mother when your become dependent on your daughter rather than she on you? - and on those, including other women and the disease itself, who control women's bodies.

Recommended and a novel I would see as a contender for the 2022 International Booker longlist.