Name: Elena Knows
ISBN: 9781999368432

Claudia Piñeiro

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.

Elena Knows

𝒏𝒐𝒏 ❦

People confuse thinking with knowing, they let themselves confuse the two. 

As if her religion were based more in the rituals, in the folklore and traditions, than in the dogma or faith. 

Line

Motherhood, Elena thinks, comes with certain things, a mother knows her child, a mother knows, a mother loves. That’s what they say, that’s how it is. She loved and still loves her daughter even though she never said it, even though they fought and kept their distance, even though their words were like cracks of a whip, and even if she didn’t hug or kiss her daughter, she felt a mother’s love. Is she still a mother now that she doesn’t have a child? If it had been her who’d died, Rita would have been an orphan. What name does she have now that she’s childless? Has Rita’s death erased everything she was? Her illness didn’t erase it. Being a mother, Elena knows, isn’t changed by any illness even if it keeps you from being able to put on a jacket, or freezes your feet so that you can’t move, or forces you to live with your head down, but could Rita’s death have taken not only her daughter’s body but also the word that names what she, Elena, is?

The aborted babies cry inside their heads. I’m the one who cries inside my head. Don’t kill an innocent being. I’m an innocent being too.

That afternoon, Rita, who was not a mother and never would be, forced another woman to become one, applying the dogma she’d learned to another woman’s body.

People like your daughter, who didn’t even know me, your daughter who didn’t have the nerve to become a mother herself but who treated my body as if it were hers to use, just like you, today, you didn’t come here to settle a debt but to commit the same crime all over again twenty years later. You came here to use my body.

Not long ago I was told I was arrogant. Don’t keep the names other people give you, Elena.

ashley

diya

Not long ago I was told I was arrogant. Don't keep the names other people give you, Elena.

indri

... (stares into a figurative camera like i'm in The Office) (this is a compliment by the way)

This was a horrible book.. in the best way possible. 

A story about motherly trauma, my favourite kind of genre, just rip my heart out and make me scream. This novel is based around a mother with a debilitating condition of Parkinson’s who is confronted with the fact that her daughter committed suicide, refusing to accept and rejecting the suicide diagnosis she makes a voyage across town to call in an old debt, to prove that her daughter would not kill herself. 

Confronting & heartbreaking, this is a book focused on emotional depth rather than plot and I ate it up. 

jaz ☁️

This was a horrible book.. in the best way possible. 

A story about motherly trauma, my favourite kind of genre, just rip my heart out and make me scream. This novel is based around a mother with a debilitating condition of Parkinson’s who is confronted with the fact that her daughter committed suicide, refusing to accept and rejecting the suicide diagnosis she makes a voyage across town to call in an old debt, to prove that her daughter would not kill herself. 

Confronting & heartbreaking, this is a book focused on emotional depth rather than plot and I ate it up. 

donna 

charisa

this was a tough read. 

a lot of difficult issues, heavy emotions, and exchanges that were nothing short of heartbreaking. 

at the center, this book was about the agency we have over our corporeal bodies. in sickness or in health, in dire emotional distress, when reckoning with life sprouting within us, how much control and agency do we (and should we) truly have? and how much should we give over to others to care for and protect us from our own dark inclinations? 

as a christian, i wrestle with this concept — i am my own, but simultaneously do not belong to myself (romans 14:8). in a way, i am a temporary caregiver, much as rita was in this story. lots of thoughts and questions, things to ponder. (and time to read something a bit lighter lol)

i love it i love it i love it so muchh!! such a peculiar approach to tackle the issues surrounding womanhood, death, and faith. 

Siya S

4.5 Stars 

HOLYSHIT THIS BOOK IS A FUCKING WILD RIDE. That part on the third act when Elena met Isabel (and unraveled and unspooled the whole suspense) was probably the best literary shit I've encountered in a long while. 

This book will live rent-free in my head for a long time. Damn, it explores all the hard contemporary questions on body rights, motherhood, caregiving the aging parents, societal norms vs free wills, and many more. It's a clever book that packs a punch and hits very close to home. 

It took me a while to get into the book, but when it did my jaw was on the floor. It's about the titular character Elena and her journey to see a woman whom Elena's deceased daughter had helped 20 years ago. The thing was that Elena believed that her daughter was murdered, and so she'd do everything in her deteriorating power to make it right. 

10/10 would recommend.

Dana Kraft

Meh. Very well written but I didn’t care for the ending

Fraser Simons

A mother with Parkinson’s, Elena, believes her daughter did not commit suicide and embarks on a physical and mental arduous journey to come to a central truth. It is a novel that starts small and ends large; from the alleged suicide of her daughter to a harrowing journey that, because it is internal and intersectional, becomes something about multiple systemic and insidious ways in which society removes agency from women and those not performing to puritanical standards.

It very much has no concern with genre expectations, as most literary intersections tend to be. My largest issue is with the formatting, though. I think it’s supposed to reflect, somewhat, the mental state of the protagonist, but it doesn’t actually seem formatted as such. Coupled with a necessary much retreading of ground to more effectively hit on memory issues Elena has, it creates an effect that constantly excises the reader from the text. Perhaps the formatting is supposed to be random, but because it’s walls and walls of text I spent my time looking for an answer and never found a satisfactory one. 

However, it’s certainly novel and interesting, and has very human, well-rendered characters—primarily featuring women. None feel archetypical and the plot also has that quality. I liked it quite a bit… after I just rolled with the unusual dense prose that I couldn’t understand the reason for.

Gary Homewood

A determined, aging widow with late Parkinsons undertakes a gruelling journey across town to investigate the suicide of her daughter. 

Plays out over the course of a day managed by her medication, their relationship is revealed in flashback, in all its complexity. 

The tropes of crime fiction, uniquely reinterpreted and used as an investigation of morality, personal beliefs, motherhood, religion and society, with an unforgettable protagonist.

After Rita is found dead in a church she used to attend, the official investigation into the incident is quickly closed. Her sickly mother is the only person still determined to find the culprit. Chronicling a difficult journey across the suburbs of the city, an old debt and a revealing conversation, Elena Knows unravels the secrets of its characters and the hidden facets of authoritarianism and hypocrisy in our society.