Elena Knows

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What steps do you take in your process to marry your work with the author’s, beyond literal translation? 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. I’m nocturnal by nature. I love being awake late at night and if adult life allowed I would probably stay up until dawn and sleep past noon every day.

the novel takes place on 1 day, and is centred around two characters - elena, who is suffering from an advanced case of parkinson’s, and her daughter rita, who is found hung in the belfry of a church she used to attend. rita’s death has been ruled a suicide, but elena doesn’t believe this, and the novel follows her on a day’s journey to find a woman who she thinks can help uncover the truth. This most recent translation is published by Charco Press, an excellent promoter of translated Latin American literature from which I have especially enjoyed several works and discovered new favourite writers such as Luis Sagasti and Karla Suárez in recent months.

There are also broader issues of motherhood explored: the difficulties that can ensue between mothers and daughters, the stigmatising of women who don't want children - but these are increasingly being written about (at last) and discussed as part of a more public debate. Born in 1943, Ultiskaya grew up in Moscow, the daughter of Jewish parents, and entered the workforce in the 1960s as a geneticist, before a run-in with the KGB closed the lab where she worked. This episode was later fictionalised in her novel Big Green Tent, one of many novels, plays and short stories that depict the lives of private individuals getting by within the Soviet machine. Through these works – notably Sonechka, Medea and Her Children, The Kukotsky Enigma, Daniel Stein, Interpreter and Jacob’s Ladder – she has amassed numerous literary awards, including Russia’s most prestigious book prizes, France’s Prix Medicis and a nomination for the Man Booker international prize. In 2020, Ulitskaya had the same odds (6/1) as Margaret Atwood and Maryse Condé to win the Nobel. Elena Knows is a day in the life of a woman with advanced Parkinson’s disease. Technically it’s a crime novel, a thriller—of sorts. It’s about a woman whose daughter has died recently, and wrapped up by the police who have said that it’s a straightforward suicide. But Elena knows that it’s not, because she knows that her daughter would never have gone near the church when it was raining, because she was terrified of lightening, and there was a lightning rod on the church, and so on, and so on. But actually, Elena Knows is an extraordinarily beautiful and harrowing description of aging and disability. Everything that happens in it happens to the rhythm of the pills she needs to take, every time she needs to stop and sit down, to pause on her way to get to the metro or the church. So, in fact, as a book, it is much closer to something like Elizabeth is Missing or Olive Kitteridge than a crime novel.” Readmore...

The thing is, we meet in a public place, and because there was a spare chair in the circle, somebody sat in it. And in the end, Rita sends Elena to the salon for an extensive treatment from hair coloring to waxing. That was a pity as the two themes, abortion and Parkinson's, are intertwined in the book—the burden of carrying another body and the right to refuse if the burden is too much for us, seems to have been what motivated the writing of Elena Knows. What do you think? When do you want a diagnosis kept private? When do you want others to know? Have you been treated differently or treated someone else differently after you have learned about a diagnosis? 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.

Translated from Spanish (Argentina) by Frances Riddle (Charco Press, 2021)

although nothing much happens in elena knows and it is quite the depressing reading experience, the sheer control that piñeiro (with the help of the translator i’m sure) has over her prose is enough to keep you gripped. But you only know something once you’ve experienced it in your life, life is our greatest test.” chapter 2, section III. The book is short yet moves slowly and painfully like Elena and captures the trauma of having one's life governed by a disease progressively worsening. The writing is taut and captures the ambiance of sorrow and suffering. It is an excellent book, though sad, and I found it difficult to read at times because of the harsh reality it so vividly portrayed. Nevertheless, I felt Elena Knows deserved its Booker nomination. 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. Es de admirar cómo la autora mete al lector no solo en la mente de los personajes, sino también en su dolor, desamparo, desesperación, rabia e impotencia.

Do stories set in a village automatically amount to escapism?” Leky responds. “I see village-like behaviour where I live in Berlin too – precisely because it’s a big city, people form together in little village communities. I don’t think it’s escapism, I think it’s more like a counter-movement against something that is perceived as too sprawling.” The tone of this book is grimmer than the only other Piñeiro I've read ( Betty Boo) and you definitely shouldn't go into this expecting any kind of crime novel. Readers who dislike a free-flow narrative without speech marks and which eases between thoughts, exposition and direct speech may want to be wary. People like your daughter, who didn’t even know me, your daughter who didn’t have the nerve to become a mother herself but who treated my body as if it were hers to use, just like you, today, you didn’t come here to settle a debt but to commit the same crime all over again twenty years later. You came here to use my body.” chapter 2, section III.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). How have you viewed a condition or a disease that you have been diagnosed with? How is it a part of you and a part of who you are and how is it separate from you? And at the same time, Rita has in many ways become the mother to Elena and will have to do even more for her own mother as the disease progresses. She is physically caring for her mother, cutting her toenails,

As with the very best crime fiction, her novels often feature incisive social and historical scrutiny. Her third novel for adults, Elena Knows, is a perfect example: a complex character study of three women affected by their society’s oppressive rules, within a murder mystery. Elena, an elderly woman with Parkinson’s disease, is investigating the death of her daughter, who has been found dead in a church belfry. The case has been hastily closed and deemed a suicide, but Elena is convinced it was murder. And on that day we will finally realise that we are all alone, forced to face ourselves, with no lies left to cling to.’ As with all of my guides, the following may contain spoilers for the novel. I recommend that you read the book before reading this guide. Online Resources Parkinson’s Daas’s depiction of Paris has been hailed by critics, showing young people marooned in suburbs only 15km from Paris, but with no direct transportation. Her beautifully drawn descriptions of endless hours on public transport were Daas’s way of exploring a commute she once considered “normal”, then grew to see as an “injustice”.Daas’s overriding message is that you don’t have to give up any part of yourself: you can inhabit a host of seemingly clashing identities at once. “I wanted to smash the codes and norms that everyone has to navigate,” Daas says. “I wanted to talk to everyone who ever felt they had to give up a part of themselves and say: ‘No, we don’t have to.’” Angelique Chrisafis I found the novella intensely thought-provoking and well-written. I traveled with Elena and experienced her discomfort, her drive, her fear, her anguish, her personal experience, and learned from her experience as an individual living with Parkinson's.A powerful book. While this is a short read, there is much to discuss about the control individuals have over our bodies, complexity of familial relationships, perspective and so much more. Elena is unable to accept the police's view that Rita's death was suicide, and sets out to investigate, seeking help from the third main character Isabel. How Isabel fits into the story cannot be described without spoilers, but the plot is revealed very cleverly in ways that mirror Elena's own growing awareness of how little she knows.