Amé este libro. Es una historia muy emotiva, muy profunda, muy humana, y sobretodo muy muy fuerte, desgarradora. Elena has Parkinson’s disease. The reader is educated on the horrors of the disease. Elena’s life revolves around her three pills a day. The story is structured about her medication: Morning, Midday, and Afternoon. These pills are the only thing that can make her body move. I was anxious waiting for her medication to take effect. Elena is on a mission: her daughter Rita died under suspicious conditions at her Catholic Church (she was found hung in the church belfry). Elena KNOWS that Rita would never go into the church when it’s raining. There’s no way she went there of her own free will. Her opinions falls on deaf ears. Her dialogues with the local priest made me so angry. When Elena informs the Priest that she KNOWS that Rita didn’t go into the church on a rainy day, the priest declares Elena of the “sins of pride and arrogance, to think that you know everything, even when the facts show something else.” Ito’s career as a journalist prevented her from staying silent, she says; if she couldn’t face the truth of what had happened to her, how could she continue her work? “It has been difficult, but rape is visible now. We see more cases in the media, we’ve had demonstrations in Tokyo and in many other cities. I have no regrets.” David McNeill I wanted to write a book about such big and vague issues that I felt I needed to locate them in a place that could be contained,” she adds. “I write about love and death, and how they are connected – it doesn’t get more diffuse than that.” Philip Oltermann

Frances Riddle lives in Buenos Aires, Argentina 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). Do you have a mother-daughter relationship in your life? How do you view the complexities, the oppositional forces, the agreements and the disagreements? The love and the discord? What do you do out of obligation for the existence of the relationship? What do you do out of caring for the relationship? How do these acts differ? Perspective I have always been fascinated with okapis because they look like made-up animals, or creatures assembled in a drunken stupor,” says 48-year-old Leky, speaking from her flat in Berlin’s Prenzlauer Berg. “This novel was similar: I wanted to bring together parts that didn’t necessarily feel like they belonged together.” The book is short yet moves slowly and painfully like Elena and captures the trauma of having one's life governed by a disease progressively worsening. The writing is taut and captures the ambiance of sorrow and suffering. It is an excellent book, though sad, and I found it difficult to read at times because of the harsh reality it so vividly portrayed. Nevertheless, I felt Elena Knows deserved its Booker nomination.

Elena knows what Rita would say if she could see her, she knows the lecture by heart but would like to hear it, would like to even hear her scolding and her insults and her anger. She’d choose Rita’s insults over her absence any day.” chapter 2, section III. Piñeiro’s writing is clean and easy to follow whilst still being powerful. There are no great wordy sentences or complicated metaphors, everything that needs to be said, is, and with just the right amount of words. It’s exactly the kind of writing that keeps me reading. ⁠ The things I found most enjoyable about translating Elena Knows were also the biggest challenges. I was Elena is a character that will stay with me, she is complicated and flawed but ultimately a good person, doing what she thinks is best. 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.⁠

Some months ago her daughter Rita, aged 44, was found hanged in a church tower. Everyone is convinced it was suicide but "Elena knows" it can't be, as it was a stormy day and her daughter, with a strong phobia of lightning, never went close to the church building in such weather. A unique tale that interweaves crime fiction with intimate tales of morality and search for individual freedom. What steps do you take in your process to marry your work with the author’s, beyond literal translation? This book is incredibly layered and deeply explores several topics; our ableist society and the hoops disabled people have to jump through to be recognised as such; dogmatism; the endurance of family caregivers; bodily autonomy; religious hypocrisy; how we can never truly know a person; and that we don’t know what we will do in a situation until we are faced with it. ⁠ The crime, therefore, is not to be sought where one would expect to find it. It is, more so, a displaced crime; much like the possibility of knowledge itself. Because – surely – Elena did not seek Isabel for her one certainly – the Certainty of certainties – to be no more. In fact, the question ‘Why did you come here?’ dominates the latter part of the narrative, and Elena must go from knowing to questioning all that she thinks she knows. (fragmentary) Perception might just be all there is.Now that the one-child policy has been relaxed, the stories of these illegal children will soon be a part of China’s national collective memory. But to those who grew up tainted with this humiliation, the scars are permanent. One is Chinese writer Shen Yang, who wrote her story in part to extinguish the nightmares that still haunt her. 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. In this way, crime and morality enter a convoluted space of complex intertwining. What could the real crime in this novel be, in the absence of one? Is it not, perhaps, that Father Juan – in the name of Christian morals – denominates Rita’s alleged suicide as a sin, and those unable to accept the harsh finality of death foolish? Is it not that Rita – herself defined by strict moral precepts, herself without child – insists on Isabel having her child, notwithstanding the latter’s certainty on wanting to proceed with abortion, and notwithstanding Rita’s complete ignorance on the matter of Isabel’s circumstances?

That was a pity as the two themes, abortion and Parkinson's, are intertwined in the book—the burden of carrying another body and the right to refuse if the burden is too much for us, seems to have been what motivated the writing of Elena Knows. When I won the Clarín Alfaguara Prize for Thursday Night Widows, José Saramago and Rosa Montero were on the jury. At the party, after announcing I was the winner and amid all the excitement, Saramago told me: ‘Make sure you talk to Rosa because we wanted to tell you something about your text, and she’ll explain it better than me.’ After a while Saramago appeared again and repeated: ‘Did you speak to Rosa yet?’ And then again. Finally, after the catering and the champagne, I had the chance to talk to Rosa Montero, and she told me: ‘Review the text before you publish. We think that the novel should end before it does. You explain too much, you say things that should remain unsaid.’ And of course they were absolutely right! In my inexperience, I wanted to explain everything to the reader, out of fear they wouldn’t understand the text the way I wanted them to. That day I learned that you have to trust your readers; taking that risk brings great benefits to the text. Ultimately, Carrera finds hope in the deep relationship he builds with his granddaughter. He sees in her all that is good in humanity and instructs her to lead the fight for truth, a challenge that she is ready and willing to accept. “It is for all of us that the novel, at the beginning and end, invites even secular people to pray,” Veronesi says. As the father of five children, he wants his readers to know how much of our future lies in the hands of younger generations, and that it is they, in particular, who need our prayers Sophia Seymour and Nina Brown And at the same time, Rita has in many ways become the mother to Elena and will have to do even more for her own mother as the disease progresses. She is physically caring for her mother, cutting her toenails, you're going to have to be your mother's mother, Rita, because Elena we know is going to be a baby.For anyone interested the digital launch event recording with the author and translator can be found here: Frances Riddle has translated numerous Spanish-language authors, including Isabel Allende, Claudia Piñeiro, Leila Guerriero, María Fernanda Ampuero, and Sara Gallardo.