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, Neither of the two beasts turns out to be quite as terrifying as they sound. Wolfhound Alaska, the metaphorical pain, is miraculously immortal but also barely capable of a growl. And while Selma’s death-by-okapi dream is the Chekhovian gun that lends Leky’s eccentric tale constant tension – and a sudden and tragic twist – the big sleep harbingered by the giraffe-like animal can also be soft and agreeable. Shortly after she was born, Shen Yang was smuggled to her grandparents’ house in a nearby city. At the age of five, she was adopted by her uncle and aunt until she was 16, to avoid the authorities’ attention. But they had an unhappy marriage, punctuated by rows and bouts of domestic violence.

Yes, Elena had a difficult relationship with her daughter Rita. Rita is her main caretaker. What they say to each other is painful. When Rita dies, Elena is hellbent on proving that Rita did not kill herself. She tells anyone who will listen that Elena loved Rita and Rita loved her. It may not have appeared that way, but they did love each other.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. ⁠

Then the discussion turned to the episode in Elena Knows where an abortion clinic is mentioned. Well, it was as if a trigger switch had been flipped. The man in the spare chair exploded into a long incoherent rant about abortion, and about how his girlfriend had wanted one but 'he knew' she must carry the baby until birth, and how right that was, and something about another girlfriend and another baby, and basically the entire story of his parenting life and his pro-life beliefs. He even threw in a mention of Ronald Reagan, insisting he was the 'wisest' man in the world. The book is broken up into sections, each one timed by the necessary pill she takes that day. The final section - or The Fourth Pill - is a literary masterwork. In Buenos Aires, where we both live, I spoke with award-winning, best-selling Argentine author Claudia Piñeiro about her book Elena Knows, out in my translation this week from Charco Press. The city is brimming with surreal and incredible stories, he adds. “You could go to a funeral and think you’re going to get an interesting story for your writing. You will leave with so many that your publisher will say, ‘Please! Not so much.’ Luanda writes far better than you can write.”When the criminal case against Yamaguchi was dropped, she took him to civil court for damages and won, in December 2019, although he has appealed against the decision. She has continued to fight, having filed libel lawsuits against three of her most prominent harassers. Yamaguchi’s career, meanwhile, appears unaffected. He insists their 2015 encounter was consensual and has filed unsuccessful countercharges against her. “It can happen to anyone who goes up against a powerful man,” she says. 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. She trudges on, one foot in front of the other, despite the fact that no one can restore the king to his throne, or restore life to her daughter, or restore her daughter to her.’ The rights to bodily autonomy become even more pronounced in the jaw-dropping final section of this novel. Claudia Piñeiro has been a prominent activist for abortion rights in Argentina, which did not legalize until December of 2020, and Elena Knows becomes a powerful look at the lives of those denied options facing a pregnancy not only against their will but from an act of violence and degredation. Dr. Kate Manne has written extensively on bodily control of women, particularly in her book Entitled: How Male Privilege Hurts Women where she examines how misogyny is used to police women’s bodies and also demonize any who reject a patriarchal control: