Elena Knows - Softcover

Claudia Piñeiro

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1999368436 ISBN 13: 9781999368432

Publisher: Charco Press, 2021

Synopsis

SHORTLISTED FOR THE INTERNATIONAL BOOKER PRIZE 2022

'A superb twist on the crime novel.' Irish Times
'A piercing commentary on mother-daughter relationships, the burdens of caregiving and the impositions of religious dogma on women.' New York Times

When Rita is found hanging in the bell tower of the local church, the police quickly rule her death a suicide. Her mother, Elena, knows they're wrong.

Living with advanced Parkinson's disease, every movement Elena makes is governed by the strict timetable of her medication. Yet she is determined to undertake one final journey across Buenos Aires to uncover what really happened to her daughter. As she pieces together the truth, long-buried secrets emerge, exposing the devastating consequences of religious dogma, misogyny and the ways society polices women's bodies.

Both an ingenious literary mystery and a deeply moving portrait of motherhood, Elena Knows is a gripping novel about love, grief and the extraordinary determination to seek justice when everyone else has stopped asking questions.

Brilliantly blending the momentum of crime fiction with the emotional depth of literary fiction, Elena Knows is an unforgettable exploration of love, loss and a woman's determination to uncover the truth.

About this title

About the Author

Born in Buenos Aires in 1960, Claudia Piñeiro is a best-selling author, known internationally for her crime novels. She has won numerous national and international prizes, including the Pepe Carvalho Prize, the LiBeraturpreis for Elena Knows and the prestigious Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz Prize for Las grietas de Jara (A Crack in the Wall). Many of her novels have been adapted for the big screen. Claudia Piñeiro is the third most translated Argentinean author, after Jorge Luis Borges and Julio Cortázar. More recently, she has become a very active figure in the fight for the legalisation of abortion in Argentina and Latin America, and for the recognition of employment rights for writers. Her fiction is rooted in the detective novel but has recently turned increasingly political.

Frances Riddle lives in Buenos Aires, where she works as a translator, writer, and editor. She holds an MA in translation studies from the University of Buenos Aires and a BA in Spanish literature. Her book-length publications include A Simple Story by Leila Guerriero (New Directions, 2017); Bodies of Summer by Martín Felipe Castagnet (Dalkey Archive Press, 2017); and The Life and Deaths of Ethel Jurado (Hispabooks, 2017). This is her fourth title for Charco Press after Slum Virgin by Gabriela Cabezón Cámara (2017), The German Room by Carla Maliandi (2018) and Theatre of War by Andrea Jeftanovic (2020).

From the Back Cover

In a single day, a journey across Buenos Aires reveals a daughter to her mother, a mother to herself, and the oppressive weight of received ideas to women connected by a fleeting encounter, twenty years before.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

The trick is to lift up the right foot, just a few centimetres off the floor, move it forward through the air, just enough to get past the left foot, and when it gets as far as it can go, lower it. That’s all it is, Elena thinks. But she thinks this, and even though her brain orders the movement, her right foot doesn’t move. It does not lift up. It does not move forward through the air. It does not lower back down. It’s so simple. But it doesn’t do it. So Elena sits and waits. In her kitchen. She has to take the train into the city at ten o’clock; the one after that, the eleven o’clock, won’t do because she took the pill at nine, so she thinks, and she knows, that she has to take the ten o’clock train, right after the medication has managed to persuade her body to follow her brain’s orders. Soon. The eleven o’clock train won’t do because by then the medicine’s effect will have diminished and almost disappeared and she’ll be back to where she is now, but without any hope that the levodopa will take effect. Levodopa is the name for the chemical that will begin circulating in her body once the pill has dissolved; she has known that name for a while now. Levodopa. The doctor said it and she wrote it down for herself on a piece of paper because she knew she wasn’t going to understand the doctor’s handwriting. She knows that the levodopa is moving through her body. All she can do now is wait. She counts the streets. She recites the names from memory. From first to last and last to first. Lupo, Moreno, 25 de Mayo, Mitre, Roca. Roca, Mitre, 25 de Mayo. Moreno, Lupo. Levodopa. It’s only five blocks to the train station, it’s not that many, she thinks, and she continues reciting the street names, and continues waiting. Five. She can’t yet shuffle down those five blocks but she can silently repeat the street names. She hopes she doesn’t run into anyone she knows today. No one who will ask after her health or give her their delayed condolences over the death of her daughter. Every day there’s some new person who couldn’t make it to the visitation or the burial. Or who didn’t dare to. Or didn’t want to. When someone like Rita dies, everyone feels invited to the funeral. That’s why ten o’clock is the worst time, she thinks, because to get to the station she has pass by the bank and today’s the day the retirees go to withdraw their pension, so it’s very likely that she’ll run into some neighbour. Or several neighbours. The bank opens right at ten o’clock, when the train should be arriving at the station and she’ll already have her ticket in her hand about to board, but before that, Elena knows, she’s going to have to pass the retirees lined up outside as if they’re afraid the money will run out so they have to get there early. She can avoid going past the bank if she makes the block, but that’s something the Parkinson’s won’t allow. That’s its name. Elena knows she hasn’t been the one in charge of some parts of her body for a while now, her feet, for example. He’s in charge. Or she. And she wonders if Parkinson’s is masculine or feminine, because even though the name sounds masculine it’s still an illness, and an illnesses is something feminine. Just like a disgrace. Or a curse. And so she thinks she should address her as My Lady, because when she thinks about it, she thinks “what a bitch of an illness.” And a bitch is a she, not a he. Excuse the expression, m’lady. Dr. Benegas explained it to her several times but she still doesn’t understand; she understands what she has because it’s inside her body, but not some of the words that the doctor uses. Rita was there when he first explained the disease. Rita, who’s now dead. He told them that Parkinson’s was a degradation of the cells of the nervous system. And both she and her daughter disliked that word. Degradation. And Dr. Benegas must’ve noticed, because he quickly tried to explain. And he said, an illness of the central nervous system that degrades, or mutates, or changes, or modifies the nerve cells in such a way that they stop producing dopamine. And then Elena learned that when her brain orders a movement to her feet, for example, the order only reaches her feet if the dopamine takes it there. Like a messenger, she thought that day. So Parkinson’s is the lady and dopamine is the messenger. And her brain is nothing, she thinks, because her feet don’t listen to it. Like a dethroned king that doesn’t realize he’s not in charge anymore. Like the emperor with no clothes from the story she used to tell Rita when she was little. The dethroned king, the naked emperor. And now it’s the lady, not Elena but her illness, the messenger, and the dethroned king. Elena repeats the names like she repeated the streets she has to pass to get to the station; the names keep her company while she waits. From first to last and last to first. She doesn’t like the naked emperor. She prefers the dethroned king. She waits, she repeats, she breaks them into pairs: the lady and the messenger; the messenger and the king, the king and the lady. She tries again but her feet are still foreign to her, not merely disobedient, but deaf. Deaf feet. Elena would love to shout at them, Move, feet, hurry it up! Dammit , she’d even shout, Move and hurry it up, dammit , but she knows it would be useless, because her feet won’t listen to her voice either. So she doesn’t shout, she waits. She silently recites the streets, kings, streets again. She adds new words to her prayer: dopamine, levodopa. She makes the connection between the dopa of dopamine and of levodopa, they must be related, but she’s just guessing, she doesn’t know for sure, she recites the words, plays with them, she lets her tongue get twisted, she waits, and she doesn’t care, she only cares that the time passes, that the pill dissolves, that it moves through her body to her feet so that they will finally get the message that they have to start moving.

Edition details

• Publisher: Charco Press
• Publication date: 2021
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1999368436
• ISBN 13: 9781999368432
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 220