Henk's Reviews > Elena Knows

Very pleased to see that this book was shortlisted for the International Booker Prize 2022! Also there is a Netflix movie adoption coming up this November!

After two rather sluggish parts, the third section of the book was absolutely brilliant and tackled themes like abortion, euthanasia and the influence of the church on society
They could’ve told you a dozen times what it feels like to have Parkinson’s, in precise, graphic words, sparing no details, but you only knew the truth once the disease was inside your body. You can imagine the pain, the guilt, the shame, the humiliation. But you only know something once you’ve experienced it in your life, life is our greatest test.

For anyone interested the digital launch event recording with the author and translator can be found here:
https://youtu.be/p0yxNIp4onk

Narrator Elena (who reminded me quite bit in stubbornness and demeanor to the main character of Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead by Olga Tokarczuk) struggling with Parkinson, is on a quest to find out the reason behind the death of her daughter.
The first two parts of the book, structured around pills that make her illness a little bit more manageable, are quite slow in pace but give a lot of flashbacks and insights into the relationship between mother and daughter throughout the last 20 years.
But boy, did Claudia Piñeiro in part three just pull the carpet right under my feet with one of the most intense dialogs between two women I remember to have read! The themes of the novel seemingly effortlessly fall in place and the emotional impact is comparable to the best that Kazuo Ishiguro manages.
Elena Knows is highly recommended, and truly breaks out of any crime writing mould one could imagine the author to occupy, as my two Nobel laureate comparisons hopefully should make clear.

Quotes:
But Elena is not astray. Elena knows. She waits. With her bowed head and her shuffling feet, without seeing the road or what it will bring. She doesn’t go astray, even if she sometimes wanders.

As if her religion were based more in the rituals, in the folklore and traditions, than in the dogma or faith. Rita, in her way, had God, a God of her own who she put together like a puzzle with her own rules. Her God and her dogma. Elena didn’t.
And even though Elena showed no concern for the roughness of her heels, Mimí said, I’m going to send you some calendula cream with Roberto. It’ll just go to waste, Elena thought, because she wasn’t willing to add any more chores to the unending list of daily challenges: walking, eating, going to the bathroom, lying down, standing up, sitting in a chair, getting up from a chair, taking a pill that won’t go down her throat because her head can’t tip back, drinking from a straw, breathing. No, she definitely wasn’t going to put calendula cream on her heels.

Sometimes it’s easier to shout than to cry.