©hrissie ❁ 's Reviews > Elena Knows

Shortlisted for the International Booker Prize 2022


Have I ever —? Actually, have you ever been deeply affected – physically – by a novel, to the point of mentally associating it with a very bodily feeling? Because – truth be told – I finished reading this novel many days ago, and the very thought of it is still very instantly-instinctively and automatically supplanted by a weighty, anxiety-ridden feeling seemingly integrated in my body. As if my own body has assimilated the awful, stressful, and painful awareness of its hypothetical – or impending – dysfunctionality. Kudos to Piñeiro – because I had never actually envisaged the factual possibility of this ever happening through the act of reading.

Elena Knows is an exceptionally moving and impactful novel that solicits an urgent reconsideration of the human body and the moral precepts that circumscribe our understanding of human agency vis-à-vis the body itself. It persistently and palpably calls for a more self-conscious and self-aware interaction with the body, of one’s body and its interactions with and response to others’ bodies; of the judgemental and unreasonable, preconceived ideas that people carry along with them as they navigate through the world. Piñeiro’s reframing of the body and all the contexts and environments in which its actioning is called forth reveals the essential fragility of the human body, exacerbated by the sum of exclusionary judgements which make for a destructive mentality and (self-)annihilating socio-political landscape.

Elena knows; she thinks she knows that her daughter Rita, found hanging from the church belfry, could not possibly have committed suicide. Because it was raining, and her daughter never dared go near the church when it was raining. (She thinks) she knows, therefore, that the police must conduct a full-scale inquiry into all possible situations that might have led to her demise. While (half-)consciously – because she is herself a human being with blind spots – avoiding and evading the possibility that circumstances leading to Rita’s death might have been of an order she is not able to face, Elena takes it upon herself to do the impossible, if she has to, in order that she might learn the truth. What she needs, for her to be (pro)active in her investigation, is a functioning body. Which is why she goes in search of Isabel, who might be able to ‘lend’ her the body she herself lacks. Of course, little did Elena know what the day’s laborious trip had in store for her: the crumbling of those very certainties that led her to undertake the trip in the first place.

In this novel, body-movement and mind-perception play an important role. Elena’s severe Parkinson’s – that ‘fucking whore illness’ – delimits and restricts her capacity for movement and range of vision (indicatively alluding to the likewise limited range of human perception). Hers is the body – with its ‘expressionless eyes’ – the reader is made to embody throughout Elena’s narration, in this way experiencing a day-in-the-life (but also a day defining a life) punctuated by the intake of the pills, Elena’s only means of securing for herself a limited measure of mobility, in the absence of which paralysis readily takes over. The experiential reality of this – as we are led to feel more than perceive – is humiliating, physically painful, depressing. Because human beings depend on their body. Without it, they simply cannot be. And taking on Elena’s illness, as it were, for the duration of the narrative means having to endure Rita’s austere and hurtful tirades, her explicit and extended account – perhaps motivated by grief, tiredness, frustration – of all the particularities that make Elena’s condition hateful and disgusting for those around her: saliva, smell, slowness. That Elena should refuse to be pitied, and manifests a sober acceptance which also defies self-pity, works to counter the mortifying sentiment foregrounded by Rita (as representative of external, unsympathetic perception).

And yet, through the very crisp articulateness of her gaze and her condition, the body is brutally divested of its religious, metaphysical, or mystical dimension. There is indeed a symptomatic overlapping and layering of the narrative’s conversely profane understanding of the body. From Elena’s illness – presented as debilitating for the body of the person inhabiting it – to her daughter’s body: a ‘body that no longer holds the person it was, a body that no longer belongs to anyone, like an empty bag, incomplete, a pod without seeds.’ Also, to the body carried within one’s body – motherhood – considered, for some, as a curse: ‘Another person’s body, sometimes, can be terrifying.’ Elena’s for Rita. Isabel’s husband – his body – for her, and the child she did not desire, at all.

In this way, crime and morality enter a convoluted space of complex intertwining. What could the real crime in this novel be, in the absence of one? Is it not, perhaps, that Father Juan – in the name of Christian morals – denominates Rita’s alleged suicide as a sin, and those unable to accept the harsh finality of death foolish? Is it not that Rita – herself defined by strict moral precepts, herself without child – insists on Isabel having her child, notwithstanding the latter’s certainty on wanting to proceed with abortion, and notwithstanding Rita’s complete ignorance on the matter of Isabel’s circumstances?

Through a compounded deconstruction of both crime and morality, Elena Knows points to the limitations of human perception (thinking that one does know, while, really, not knowing much at all) and human endurance. The implication being that a person can be brought to go against what seems to most define their personality, thus revealing the Emptiness underneath, in its crude and indelible concreteness. And, ultimately, the essential aloneness of the human condition.

‘Never isn’t a word that applies to our species, there are so many things that we think we’d never do and yet, when put in the situation, we do them.’

‘And on that day we will finally realise that we are all alone, forced to face ourselves, with no lies left to cling to.’

The crime, therefore, is not to be sought where one would expect to find it. It is, more so, a displaced crime; much like the possibility of knowledge itself. Because – surely – Elena did not seek Isabel for her one certainly – the Certainty of certainties – to be no more. In fact, the question ‘Why did you come here?’ dominates the latter part of the narrative, and Elena must go from knowing to questioning all that she thinks she knows. (fragmentary) Perception might just be all there is.


4.5 stars. An important, powerful novel from Argentinian author Claudia Piñeiro.

Elena Knows could be said to embody a Joycean journey in miniature: the diminished epic of a maimed and degenerate body, in its search for knowledge and truth.