Elena Knows

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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. They could’ve told you a dozen times what it feels like to have Parkinson’s, in precise, graphic words, sparing no details, but you only knew the truth once the disease was inside your body. You can imagine the pain, the guilt, the shame, the humiliation. But you only know something once you’ve experienced it in your life, life is our greatest test. 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 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.

In Buenos Aires, where we both live, I spoke with award-winning, best-selling Argentine author Claudia Piñeiro about her book Elena Knows, out in my translation this week from Charco Press. 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.’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. I walk when I’m reading, or I read when I’m walking. As if I belonged to the peripatetic school. My father used to do the same. I might be inside the house or out on the street. Or even on a treadmill. To date, I haven’t had an accident or crashed into anyone, miraculously! Then the discussion turned to the episode in Elena Knows where an abortion clinic is mentioned. Well, it was as if a trigger switch had been flipped. The man in the spare chair exploded into a long incoherent rant about abortion, and about how his girlfriend had wanted one but 'he knew' she must carry the baby until birth, and how right that was, and something about another girlfriend and another baby, and basically the entire story of his parenting life and his pro-life beliefs. He even threw in a mention of Ronald Reagan, insisting he was the 'wisest' man in the world. I find it admirable how the author takes us readers not only into the minds of the characters, but also into their pain, helplessness, despair, rage and impotence. He didn't leave but he became quite subdued after that. And while we went on to discuss further aspects of one of the main themes in Elena Knows, the Parkinson's theme, and spoke about the dilemma of being a carer for a parent with the disease, we all seemed of one mind in avoiding any further mention of the other important theme, abortion.

Have I ever —? Actually, have you ever been deeply affected – physically – by a novel, to the point of mentally associating it with a very bodily feeling? Because – truth be told – I finished reading this novel many days ago, and the very thought of it is still very instantly-instinctively and automatically supplanted by a weighty, anxiety-ridden feeling seemingly integrated in my body. As if my own body has assimilated the awful, stressful, and painful awareness of its hypothetical – or impending – dysfunctionality. Kudos to Piñeiro – because I had never actually envisaged the factual possibility of this ever happening through the act of reading. 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. 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 I can't think of another novel that has so deeply and intimately drawn me into the experience of someone living with a debilitating illness. Elena is in a late stage of Parkinson's disease where every physical action is timed around when her pills can be taken as these allow her a limited amount of movement. In the interim periods her body refuses to respond to messages from her brain and, even with the pills, normal actions which we take for granted are an enormous struggle. This is especially problematic as Elena is determined to visit someone on this day to call in an old debt. Her daughter Rita was recently found hanging in the belfry of a church. Elena doesn't accept the police's conclusion that it was a suicide and is determined to uncover the mys 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).For anyone interested the digital launch event recording with the author and translator can be found here: 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.

In this short but impactful read, we follow Elena, an ageing woman suffering from advanced Parkinson’s. Unconvinced her daughter’s death was the suicide everyone else thinks it is, she decides to investigate. Over the course of a single day, Elena travels across Buenos Aires to meet a woman who she thinks can help her, whilst also recalling memories of her strained relationship with her daughter and how her disease has progressed since her first diagnosis. ⁠ Leky’s coming-of-age novel, told in three sections set a decade apart, is populated by oddball characters with outlandish superstitions and peculiar verbal tics – “people who have been fitted into this world askew”, she says. Her taste for eccentrics was fashioned by her upbringing: her father is a psychoanalyst, her mother a psychotherapist, and while her parents weren’t allowed to talk about their patients in public, they discussed cases in bed at night. “I stood behind their bedroom door and listened,” Leky recalls. November 1, 2023 Update Has been adapted for film and will be streamed by Netflix beginning November 24, 2023. Watch the trailer here. This idea is juxtaposed with the plight of Rita, who has to spend all her time caring for Elena. She does it because she loves her mother, even despite their frequent arguments and annoyances with each other, but the mental toll it takes is severe. There is not enough money for her to seek any outside assistance and here we also see how our own agency to our bodies and our lives is affected by our financial status. Elena Knows looks at all the ways outside influences are vying for possession of bodies and the costs of being the victim in these situations. The Hummingbird has captivated European readers, selling more than 300,000 copies in Italy alone and making Veronesi only the second author to win the Premio Strega, Italy’s most prestigious literary award, twice. The film adaptation is in production in Italy, starring Nanni Moretti (winner of the Cannes Palm d’Or) and Bérénice Bejo (nominated for an Oscar for her role in The Artist) and the novel hashe work has already been translated into 24 languages, with Elena Pala’s English translation lauded by Ian McEwan among others.When the criminal case against Yamaguchi was dropped, she took him to civil court for damages and won, in December 2019, although he has appealed against the decision. She has continued to fight, having filed libel lawsuits against three of her most prominent harassers. Yamaguchi’s career, meanwhile, appears unaffected. He insists their 2015 encounter was consensual and has filed unsuccessful countercharges against her. “It can happen to anyone who goes up against a powerful man,” she says. Do you really think she needs a certificate to show she’s disabled, why would you ask for something so obvious?” chapter 4, section II.