PicoBlog

Claudia Piñeiro’s Elena Knows, translated by Frances Riddle, is beautiful and devastating. Those are the same words I used to describe Daisy Hildyard’s The Second Body; I’ve somehow been picking up books that reach me in a particularly emotional way, and I’m not sure I like it. Stop making me feel things, literature! It’s painful!

The Elena of the novel’s title is a woman in her 60s whose daughter, Rita, has recently died. She was found hanging in a church belfry. Everyone is convinced it was suicide — that’s exactly what it looks like — but Elena is sure it’s murder. Rita was scared of lightning and terrified at the possibility that lightning would strike the cross on the church roof, so she never went anywhere near churches on rainy days. The day she died was rainy, so it makes no sense that she would have hanged herself in a church on that day. Something else must have happened.

No one believes Elena, including the local police, although they do listen to her, if only to be polite. So she decides to take matters into her own hands. The problem is that she is suffering from Parkinson’s disease and can only move with the help of pills. She takes a pill in the morning, waits for it to take effect, and then is able to move very slowly and carefully for a little while until the pill wears off. She has to wait, immobilized, until it’s time for another pill. She’s losing control of her neck and back muscles, so she’s permanently hunched over, able to see only the floor and a little bit ahead of her and to the side.

All she can think of to do to prove that her daughter was murdered is enlist the help of a woman named Isabel who owes her a favor — we don’t learn why for a while — but she hasn’t seen Isabel in years and has to travel across Buenos Aires to find her.

So she sets off on a journey, and it’s one of the most suspenseful reading experiences I’ve had in a long time. How in the world is this woman going to journey by herself across Buenos Aires, a trip that includes walking blocks to the train station, catching a train, and then hoping she finds her way after that? We follow her as she slowly, slowly makes her way, hoping to get far enough before her medicine wears off. As she travels, we follow her thoughts, which fill in details of her past and her relationship with Rita, so a more and more complex picture of the two — and of Isabel — emerges.

I love that Piñeiro has written an utterly riveting story about the courage of an older woman — she thinks at one point about how she’s only in her 60s but the disease makes her look much older — whom no one wants to take seriously. I also love that this woman is prickly and difficult and had a vexed relationship with her daughter, who, although we never meet her in the book, also seemed to be prickly and difficult. Elena’s determination and courage are so admirable, but she’s also kind of awful. Her memories of Rita are painful — painful for her, although she doesn’t want to admit it, and also painful for the reader. They were frequently nasty to each other and mean to other people. Elena’s drive and her total lack of concern about what other people think allow her to survive, but they also make her a very anti-heroic heroine.

The novel is written in a close third person, so we have access to her thoughts but we also know how she comes across to others. We see how much she’s suffering but also how hard it was for Rita to care for her. We see how Elena doesn’t care and can’t care that she’s badly groomed, and we’re aware of how this looks to the strangers around her. It’s tense and uncomfortable and perfect.

Piñeiro is known as a crime writer, but this book’s relationship to that genre is not at all straightforward. Elena is convinced — she knows — she’s in a crime story and she’s determined to solve the mystery, but her first task is to convince others that she’s right. So the novel’s most pressing questions are not so much who committed the crime as whether a crime was committed at all and whether Elena will ever persuade people to see things her way. Solving the crime is Elena’s goal, but that’s so far off in the distance; all she can do for now is insist that, yes, this is a crime story and should be treated as such.

Her real problem is that, since the police won’t take her seriously, she needs to become a detective to solve the case, but her disease makes that impossible. So her quest is, first, to convince the police that they are wrong, and, failing at that, to get Isabel to become a detective for her. It all seems so impossible, but she doesn’t think about that. She just does it.

Reading about Elena’s situation was harrowing for me on a personal level because someone important to me has Parkinson’s. This person’s version of the disease isn’t like Elena’s at all, but it was still hard to read about. Again, my habit of not reading a book’s description before picking it up has gotten me into trouble. I could have set the book down and moved on to something else, and I’m not sure why I didn’t, except that the novel is immediately engrossing, and, as it went on, I was more and more fascinated by what felt like an inside perspective on the disease. Imagining — alongside Piñeiro’s imagining — what having Parkinson’s is like was painful, but the careful attention she pays to it was also comforting. She treats Elena as an important figure, someone worthy of the time and care it takes to capture a life in fiction, complicated and messy as that life is.

New (mostly) small-press books out this week that I haven’t yet read and am adding to my TBR. All quotations below are from the publisher:

• Another Appalachia: Coming Up Queer and Indian in a Mountain Place by Neema Avashia (West Virginia University Press): “Another Appalachia examines both the roots and the resonance of Avashia's identity as a queer desi Appalachian woman, while encouraging readers to envision more complex versions of both Appalachia and the nation as a whole.”

• Scattered All Over the Earth by Yoko Tawada, translated by Margaret Mitsutani (New Directions): I wrote a very brief review of this book for Foreword Reviews. “Welcome to the not-too-distant future: Japan, having vanished from the face of the earth, is now remembered as ‘the land of sushi.’”

• Lucky Breaks by Yevgenia Belorusets, translated by Eugene Ostashevsky (New Directions): Belorusets is Ukrainian, if you’re looking for Ukrainian literature to read. “Out of the impoverished coal regions of Ukraine known as the Donbass, where Russian secret military intervention coexists with banditry and insurgency, the women of Yevgenia Belorusets's captivating collection of stories emerge from the ruins of a war, still being waged on and off, ever since the 2014 Revolution of Dignity.”

• Dreadfully Sorry: Essays on American Nostalgia by Jennifer Niesslen (Belt Publishing): “Candid essays on personal and cultural American nostalgia, focusing on the author's working-class, Rust Belt family history.”

• Customs: Poems by Solmaz Sharif (Graywolf): “Solmaz Sharif examines what it means to exist in the nowhere of the arrivals terminal, a continual series of checkpoints, officers, searches, and questionings that become a relentless experience of America.”

• Plum Bun: A Novel Without a Moral by Jessie Redmon Fauset (Beacon Press, originally published in 1929): “Originally published in 1929 at the height of the Harlem Renaissance, Plum Bun is the story of Angela Murray, a young Black woman of mixed heritage who uses the advantages of her lighter skin to escaper her own life.”

• Haymaker in Heaven by Edvard Hoem, translated by Tara Chace (Milkweed Editions): This novel is the March selection of the delightful Du Mois Monthly. They describe it as “a brawny ode to fertility and faith, a novel wholeheartedly invested in every divot and pore of its rolling landscapes.” Historical fiction set in late nineteenth-century Norway and America.

Recently Acquired:

• More Was Lost by Eleanor Perényi (NYRB, 2016; originally published in 1946): I got this and the next two books in a recent NYRB sale. “More Was Lost is a memoir of her youth abroad, written in the early days of World War II, after her return to the United States.”

• John Aubrey: My Own Life by Ruth Scurr (NYRB, 2016): I’m always interested in books about biography or unconventional biographies. “This intimate diary of Aubrey's days is composed of his own words, collected, collated, and enlarged upon by Ruth Scurr in an act of meticulous scholarship and daring imagination.”

• The Mangan Inheritance by Brian Moore: (NYRB, 2011; originally published in 1979): “Not so long ago James Mangan was a brilliant young poet. These days, however, he toils as a journalist and shivers in the shadow of his glamorous movie-star wife. And now she has left him for her lover.”

• Checkout 19 by Claire-Louise Bennett (Riverhead, 2022): I hope to reread Bennett’s first book Pond at some point soon. This follow-up sounds great: “the adventures of a young woman discovering her own genius, through the people she meets—and dreams up—along the way.”

• The Art of Death: Writing the Final Story by Edwidge Danticat (Graywolf Press, 2017): The Graywolf “Art Of” series is so interesting! This one is “at once a personal account of her mother dying from cancer and a deeply considered reckoning with the ways that other writers have approached death in their own work.”

• The Volcano Lover: A Romance by Susan Sontag (St. Martin’s Press, 2004; originally published in 1992): I’m venturing into historical fiction! This novel is set in 18th-century Naples and is based on the life of Sir William Hamilton.

• Against Interpretation: And Other Essays by Susan Sontag (Picador, 2001; originally published in 1966): I’ve only read the title essay so far, but what an essay!

• Universal Harvester by John Darnielle (Picador, 2018): My current audiobook. Darnielle reads it himself and is very good.

For Cormac’s bedtime reading, we have finally moved on from Tolkien — Rick read a lot of Tolkien’s books — and have moved on to Stephen King. We’re not reading a scary King book — don’t worry! — but his fantasy book for kids, The Eyes of the Dragon. It’s going really well so far. Personally, I have no idea what’s happening in the book, as I let my mind wander to my own concerns while Rick’s reading. Cormac is really into it, though. It turns out, Stephen King knows how to get people sucked into a story! Okay, not me in this case, but Cormac does not like having to stop reading every evening. He noticed the other day that King ends each chapter on an exciting note, so we talked about how he does that intentionally to make it hard to put the book down. We’ve discussed how Cormac might think about how he can give his own stories a similar kind of excitement and suspense. Cormac made it clear that he doesn’t want to write horror as King does, but seems open to learning from his storytelling style. This seems promising! If Cormac can write stories like King does, we all may be looking forward to a comfortable retirement…

Have a good week everyone!

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