FEATURED REVIEW
ELENA KNOWS by Claudia Piñeiro, translated by Frances Riddle, Charco Press.
Claudia Piñeiro
Argentine Crime Novelist who has drawn comparisons to storytellers both within the genre and without, from Hitchcock to Thomas Bernard to Julio Cortazar.
Shown here at La Feria Internacional del Libro de Santiago 2015.
Photo Credit: Rodrigo Fernandez, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
Elena Knows, by Argentine crime novelist Claudia Piñeiro, has at last made its way into English, fifteen years after its original publication in Spanish. Piñeiro is widely and justly popular, not just in Argentina but throughout Latin America, known for her novels that push the boundaries of conventional crime fiction, both in form and in content.
Elena Knows is a short, novella length book that takes as its main character an aging widow—suffering from end stage Parkinson’s—whose only daughter has been found hanging from the bell tower of the neighborhood church in Buenos Aries. Elena refuses to believe the police explanation, and starts out across town, in defiance of the Parkinson’s that cripples her—head bent, shuffling, unable to raise her eyes past ground level—in search of a woman she believes can help solve the mystery of her daughter’s death.
This crosstown journey forms the narrative spine of the novel, straight forward enough, on the face of it, but this is also a stream of consciousness narrative, told mostly within Elena’s point of view, that moves seamlessly back and forth in time. The tonal range in the prose is likewise more complex than it seems, going from the colloquial to the poetic to the philosophic, yet all of piece, while not calling attention to itself (an accomplishment echoed quite well by translator Frances Riddle). The novel captures the grit of the working-class neighborhood, but also a Kafkaesque underworld—of welfare bureaucracy, of hospital beds, of endless subway rides. All is filtered through the protagonist’s consciousness: an individual —in search of her daughter’s killer—whose mind is increasingly unable to control the action of her Parkinson’s ridden body.
In its psychological dimensions, the book has drawn comparisons to Hitchcock, but also, in literary circles, to expressionist novelists such as Thomas Bernhard, whose novels enter similar philosophical ground. Part of the appeal of this novel is its humor, a dark humor to be sure, but also its refusal of sentimentality: in its portrayal of the mother/daughter relations, of the Catholic priest, of the cops, of the main character herself. All are at once grotesques but also intensely human and familiar.
Likewise, the tale insists on paradox.
Piñeiro does not drag her thematic concerns into the daylight—like some tawdry moral laundry in need of illumination—but instead leaves them to lie in the shadows of the tale itself, paradoxical, dualistic, ultimately inexpressible, yet as integral to the conception of the story as bestiality to Simenon, as sociopathy to Highsmith, as the prison of linear time to the infinite fictions of Julio Cortazar.
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Elena Knows
“Hitchcock is a woman: she is called Claudia Piñiero and she lives in Buenos Aires.”
Corriere della Sera