Elena Knows

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Have you been treated differently or treated someone else differently after you have learned about a diagnosis? Born in France to an Algerian family, she was a lesbian, a Muslim, a teenager from the stigmatised banlieue suburbs who spent hours on overcrowded buses to get to the capital to study. Convictions about how another person should experience something they themselves had never experienced, how people should walk through life along the roads they’d walked down and the ones they hadn’t, issuing decrees about what should and shouldn’t be done. It's almost surreal how her illness makes her hyper-aware of things she hadn't previously considered so that her own body reveals itself as a foreign landscape.

Mariana Leky’s magical-realist bestseller What You Can See from Here is full of innocent animals standing in for something more sinister. She was crushed by her first press conference in June 2017, in a room filled with mostly indifferent male reporters. But I like to do this as a first step because I want to let the author’s voice and style come through as much as possible without me imposing my preferences right away. I don’t think it’s escapism, I think it’s more like a counter-movement against something that is perceived as too sprawling.

Daas won the Les Inrockuptibles first novel award for the poetic, straight-talking and often comic account. 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.

I came up with Henri after watching the news two years ago – it was nothing compared to today, but I thought back then that the world was a pretty crazy chaotic place. I already lived in the city, but I got on the train and took that trip because I thought maybe things had changed. I love translating fiction and I feel lucky that I get to sit down every day and do this as my job; I still want to pinch myself sometimes.These jobs are often difficult and underpaid, but many caregivers receive no compensation such as those caring for elderly parents or mothers.

We follow her journey as she discovers the truth behind this tragic event and, in the process, get a profound insight into the challenges of her daily existence. Dammit, she’d even shout, Move and hurry up, dammit, but she knows it would be useless, because her feet won’t listen to her voice either.In the interview with Maria Antonieta Alcalde, Alcalde shares the breadth of inclusion in their movement and offers insight on what the U.

How much are based on your upbringing or influenced by who you’ve met and formed relationships with? There are many instances of individuals experiencing a lack of control over their bodies in the novel from Elena and her Parkinson’s to Rita being subjected to a painful procedure, inflating her belly with body angled down, because her mother wants to know if she has a uterus to Isabel’s rape and carrying the child to Isabel being denied an abortion because a stranger showed up.Because nowhere does it explain to you what it’s going to be like when you’re drooling uncontrollably, or when you can’t get out of bed, or when certain things affect your daily life. But actually, Elena Knows is an extraordinarily beautiful and harrowing description of aging and disability. Then there were other stylistic or word-level issues that I talked about with Fionn Petch, the editor for this book, and he came up with some great, elegant solutions. We follow her on a path of self-discovery and witness that despite her hardships, she has such a strong sense of self and a fierce desire for life.