Elena sabe (Elena Knows)

Reviewed by Leda Schiavo, Buenos Aires, Argentina -- Críticas, 12/15/2007

This novel about an exasperated relationship between a mother and her daughter is narrated in third person from the mother’s point of view. The mother, Elena, a poor woman with Parkinson’s disease, launches a search for her daughter’s alleged assassin. She appears to have been hanged from the bell tower of the church, and even though everybody agreed that it was a suicide, “Elena knows” that this is impossible; she is sure that her daughter had been killed. Since no one helps her or supports her assumption, Elena makes a long, tiring trip—to meet a woman who her daughter, a practicing Catholic, had encouraged not to have an abortion and who Elena supposed was now happy and grateful. But the woman hates her husband and so hates Elena’s daughter for preventing the abortion. “I can’t help you because I was the one that killed your daughter,” she says, but we know that she killed her only with her thoughts because she had been prevented from achieving something that signified her freedom. The novel deftly features the difficulties of the mother-daughter relationship, with its near total interdependency. Elena is difficult, dominant, and obsessive, and she and her daughter were hardly able to communicate even with people to whom they were close; most people are just too busy with their own affairs. Ultimately, the theme here is loneliness, and the story communicates the anguish of it characters with great skill. Published after the success of Pineiro’s prize-winning Las viudas de los jueves (Thursday’s Widows), this novel is recommended for those who can appreciate the short novel, because it is a masterpiece of the genre