Barbara 's Reviews > Elena Knows

“Elena Knows”, by Claudia Pineiro was short-listed for the International Booker Prize 2022. Frances Riddle is the translator of this Argentinian story.

From the start, I was consumed by this story. The issues raised by Pineiro in this story are women’s rights, especially abortion; furthermore, motherhood is studied, especially mother-daughter relationships, along with the challenges of the ill and aging body. The bureaucracy involved to get Elena the care that she required is heart-wrenching.

Elena has Parkinson’s disease. The reader is educated on the horrors of the disease. Elena’s life revolves around her three pills a day. The story is structured about her medication: Morning, Midday, and Afternoon. These pills are the only thing that can make her body move. I was anxious waiting for her medication to take effect. Elena is on a mission: her daughter Rita died under suspicious conditions at her Catholic Church (she was found hung in the church belfry). Elena KNOWS that Rita would never go into the church when it’s raining. There’s no way she went there of her own free will. Her opinions falls on deaf ears. Her dialogues with the local priest made me so angry. When Elena informs the Priest that she KNOWS that Rita didn’t go into the church on a rainy day, the priest declares Elena of the “sins of pride and arrogance, to think that you know everything, even when the facts show something else.”

Pineiro shows the duplicity of the catholic church. The doctrine of the church worms it’s way into people’s minds. Elena notes that Rita and her middle-aged boyfriend seem to rigidly accept the church’s doctrines to the extent of imposing the doctrines on strangers. Pineiro writes Rita and Roberto are “united by their convictions about how another person should experience something they themselves had never experienced”. In fact, one theme is about not really knowing what you would do under a particular situation until it happens to you directly. “The Church condemns any wrongful use of the body that does not belong to us, whatever name you want to give the action, suicide, abortion, euthanasia”.

Yes, Elena had a difficult relationship with her daughter Rita. Rita is her main caretaker. What they say to each other is painful. When Rita dies, Elena is hellbent on proving that Rita did not kill herself. She tells anyone who will listen that Elena loved Rita and Rita loved her. It may not have appeared that way, but they did love each other.

The story is one day in the life of Elena as she travels to see a woman who came into Rita’s and Elena’s life 20 years ago. Elena thinks this woman, Isabel, can help Elena in sleuthing Rita’s death. Elena begins the story righteous in her beliefs. Through her day, we learn the backstory to Rita and Elena’s life.

A bit of history on Pineiro, she was part of the activism that changed the abortion law in Argentina. In 2021 abortion became legal for the first time since 1886. She mostly known as a crime writer. She also was instrumental in the movement against femicide.

Translator Frances Riddle has translated many Spanish authors including Isabel Allende, Claudia Pineiro, Leila Guerriero, Maria Femanda Ampero and Sara Gallaro. She’s originally from Houston, Texas and lives in Buenos Aires.

I was very moved by this story.