Elena Knows (2007) by Claudia Piñeiro
Reading stats
Dates read: 6 Jan to 9 Jan 2026
Discovered through: New York Times Book Review
Book format: E-book (Kindle)
Genre: Mystery, literary fiction
Synopsis
Rita is dead, and only Elena seems to be interested in finding her daughter's murderer. Everyone else — their neighbors, the police, even Rita's boyfriend, Roberto — seems to accept the ruling of suicide at face value, but elderly Elena knows there is something more sinister about Rita's death. Despite the limitations placed on her body by Parkinson's disease, Elena sets out to uncover the truth and find her daughter's killer.
Thoughts
I'm doing the book a great disservice by writing my thoughts down long after I finished reading it, but I wanted to start my series of book reviews with this title in particular.
This is a story about the hardships of caregiving, the complex relationship between a mother and her daughter, the experience of being trapped in one's body by a terrible, debilitating disease such as Parkinson's — or as Elena calls it, the ‘fucking whore illness’. It is about regret, about humiliation, about bodily autonomy. The book struck something inside me so deeply about these things that when I reached the third and final part of the novel, I felt blindsided (and, I admit, a little peeved) by another layer, another major player, another transgression.
Looking back, Isabel was waiting in the wings the entire time. Rita's involvement in the birth of Isabel's child was hinted at multiple times over the course of Elena's day, and in Isabel's case, the subject of bodily autonomy and motherhood is not too far removed. But when I remember this book, Isabel is an afterthought; I remember Elena, I remember her pills, and I remember the ugliness of her interactions with Rita.
She doesn’t have a timetable. Her time is measured in pills. The different-coloured pills she carries in her handbag, in the bronze pill box with several compartments that Rita gave her for her last birthday. So you don’t mix them all up, she told her and set the box on the table. It wasn’t wrapped, just stuck inside a clear plastic bag, with no name on it, like the kind you get at the grocery store, but thinner and without any label. What about the candles? Elena had asked.
In this scene, Rita then digs around the kitchen drawer for a candle — not a birthday candle, but one that had already been well-used for emergencies — and lit it for her mother to blow out. There is a quiet and restrained rage, a pointed cruelty.
Yet Rita's actions and unspoken frustration seem familiar to me. Piñeiro, even in translation, does not depict Rita stomping towards the kitchen or slamming the drawer shut. These descriptions are unnecessary and even incongruous; I know from experience that sometimes there is no sound at all.
—
When I remember this book, I also remember the sudden fear and shame I felt when I'd read more than half of the novel before realizing that my estranged father, too, had suffered from Parkinson's. I couldn't remember the last time I'd seen or spoken to him before he died. And while I knew of the disease, I didn't care enough about him to find out more.
To be clear, I still didn't, but now the knowledge of what his life must have been in his final years was now thrust upon me in the form of this book. Elena's desire to live became my father's; her days, punctuated by the medication she requires to operate her body, could've be his.
Rating
A (1) + B (1) + D (1) + G (1) = 4 stars
Read about my rating system here.