I can't think of another novel that has so deeply and intimately drawn me into the experience of someone living with a debilitating illness. Elena is in a late stage of Parkinson's disease where every physical action is timed around when her pills can be taken as these allow her a limited amount of movement. In the interim periods her body refuses to respond to messages from her brain and, even with the pills, normal actions which we take for granted are an enormous struggle. This is especially problematic as Elena is determined to visit someone on this day to call in an old debt. Her daughter Rita was recently found hanging in the belfry of a church. Elena doesn't accept the police's conclusion that it was a suicide and is determined to uncover the mystery behind her daughter's death. We follow her journey as she discovers the truth behind this tragic event and, in the process, get a profound insight into the challenges of her daily existence. However, this isn't a story that's as miserable as it sounds. Elena isn't the nicest person - often with good reason. She's irascible, extremely rude to some people and has a keen sense of irony. So following her thoughts and reflections is often a darkly funny and entertaining experience, but it's also very moving and enlightening. All these elements make this a riveting, revelatory and brilliantly imaginative story.
Though Elena is only 64 years old she has the appearance of someone much older. She's unable to fully lift her head so that in the course of her journey our perspective of the world is limited to only what she can see. Usually this is people's shoes or the ground. This is one of the ways this narrative locks the reader so fully into her experience. At one point before her death, her daughter demanded she go to a beauty salon and, during the course of a pedicure, the beautician suggested she regularly use a cream on her feet. However, “she wasn't willing to add any more chores to the unending list of daily challenges: walking, eating, going to the bathroom, lying down, standing up, sitting in a chair, getting up from a chair, taking a pill that won't go down her throat because her head can't tip back, drinking from a straw, breathing. No, she definitely wasn't going to put calendula cream on her heels.” At almost every point in the story we're made aware of how all these necessary actions which most of us perform unconsciously require a big effort on her part because of the limitations her illness imposes. She comes to think of her disease as a separate entity in itself which she describes in the most disparaging and vicious terms like a hateful neighbour that has taken control and resides within her body.
There are so many lines in this book which made me attentive to aspects of physical existence which I normally don't consider. For instance, Elena observes how “She'd never had to think about her neck, about her eyebrows, to wonder whether they were muscles or flesh, or just skin, and she doesn't know what they are, but they hurt.” It's almost surreal how her illness makes her hyper-aware of things she hadn't previously considered so that her own body reveals itself as a foreign landscape. The story also gives an insight into the tremendous burden Elena's illness causes for the people around her. Before her death, Rita was Elena's full time carer assisting her with feeding, bathing, going to the bathroom and almost every daily action. This put an enormous mental, physical and financial strain on their relationship and Elena comments about how much they bickered. Rita also possessed some conservative values which caused conflicts and harm to people she encountered. I appreciated how the novel sympathetically shows the strenuous challenges Rita faced and the difficulty this caused in her relationship with her mother while also acknowledging her foibles at the same time. It's a tragic situation, but it's meaningful how Elena doesn't perceive herself as a victim and how she's committed to living though her illness has severely reduced the quality of her life. This is an example of a novel whose impact and meaning will continue to resonate with me for many years.
