Elena Knows

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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. Frances Riddle has translated numerous Spanish-language authors, including Isabel Allende, Claudia Piñeiro, Leila Guerriero, María Fernanda Ampuero, and Sara Gallardo.

The Hummingbird by Sandro Veronesi, translated by Elena Pala, is published by Weidenfeld & Nicolson. 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. Fatima Daas is a pseudonym, chosen to match her central character. She began writing fiction aged 14, and her talent was spotted in high-school writing workshops. She later took a creative writing master’s degree.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. My first reading memory is a book called Chico Carlo by Juana de Ibarbourou, an iconic Uruguayan female author. It’s a book that was very widely read when I was a girl. There’s a story in it called “The Damp Stain”, in which a solitary child invents stories based on what they can see in a damp patch on the ceiling of their bedroom. A kind of kid-lit Borgesian Aleph. This image, this reading, has always stayed with me, and I think there’s a lot of it in the writer that I became. A subtle and skillful exploration to how far women have the right to control their own bodies” — The Conversation!

Maybe that’s why Rita had been so ambivalent and cold towards her faith. Because she was raised by one fervent Catholic, and one who only pretended to be.” chapter 3 section II. 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, How do you view people missing the anger and insults after a death? What does it mean to you to miss the difficulties of a relationship alongside the love of a relationships?

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

I wanted to write a book about such big and vague issues that I felt I needed to locate them in a place that could be contained,” she adds. “I write about love and death, and how they are connected – it doesn’t get more diffuse than that.” Philip Oltermann 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... 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.’ Ludmila Ulitskaya’s Just the Plague is not, as its title might suggest, an early mover in the field of “corona-lit”. It refers instead to the little known and potentially disastrous outbreak of plague in Moscow in 1939, which was swiftly thwarted by the secret police. Written as a screenplay in the late 1980s, it was submitted by Ulitskaya, then an unknown, as part of a scriptwriting course application. It was rejected and buried among her discarded papers. “Thirty-two years have passed,” she writes in the epigraph, “and the script has now acquired a new significance.”

The musical quality of the novel is key – the story races along with the pace of a song or a poem, punctuated by the repeated line “My name is Fatima Daas”. It deliberately reads as if being spoken aloud – in contrast to the “absolute silence” the character grows up in. Daas says it was a way for her to say, as a novelist: “I exist, I am, I love, I want”. The Pew Research Center conducted a survey on the views of American Catholics towards abortion in 2022. 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. And on that day we will finally realise that we are all alone, forced to face ourselves, with no lies left to cling to.’She wonders why she says she has Parkinson’s when she doesn’t have it, it’s the last thing she want to have. She suffers it, she curses it, but she doesn’t have it, having it implies a desire to keep something close, and she desires no such thing.” chapter 2, section III.