‘Is Parkinson’s a male or a female name?’ Elena questions herself as she waits for her medicine to kick in, so that she could catch the 10am train to where she wants to go. An elderly woman in her sixties, with a ‘Parkinson-plus’ disease, Elena is the pitiable yet determined protagonist of Pineiro’s novel. Her forty-year-old daughter, Rita, is dead as the novel opens. From the first chapter, we can see how Rita was the sole caretaker of her mother: no grandchildren, no father, no one else. But while all the evidences are in favor of Rita’s suicide by hanging, Elena knows that it must’ve been a murder. It was raining that day, and Rita never went out in the rain; she was afraid of getting struck by the lightening.
Parkinson’s is disease of the nervous system malfunctioning or completely shutting down, leaving parts of the patient’s body unresponsive. A Parkinson’s patient feels, like Elena, dethroned from their own body. You drool, you piss yourself, you can’t talk, move, or do anything. You are miserable, in other words. But is Parkinson a male or female name? Female, supposes Elena. And since it is a female name, then she can call it a whore: a fucking whore disease that leaves her dethroned of her own body. How is she supposed to find the murderer of her daughter when her own body refuses to help her?
The bitter playfulness with the name of Parkinson’s disease, along with a few other Elena-related quirks (repeating certain names from first to last, last to first), are the few things which a reader can take lightly about this novel. These little windows are the only source of breathing for a reader who would find him/herself congested in a very pressing and intense story of an old lady, suffering from a, literally, debilitating disease, and trying to solve her daughter’s suicide/murder case.
This story is odd for many reasons: the protagonist of this novel isn’t only pitiable, but very eccentric when it comes to ‘protagonists.’ She is, arguably due to her disease and her dead daughter, utterly removed from other people. She doesn’t grieve either; her efforts in proving her daughter’s suicide to be murder, shows how Elena might be distracting from the pain of her daughter, but also her sole caretaker, killing herself. And why aren’t there any family? No children, husband, or in-laws? Aside from a doctor and Rita’s boyfriend, there isn’t anyone that a reader could turn to for something else.
What Pineiro does, however, to deserve all the hype that her novel is getting, is an honest and brutal storytelling that includes not only an elderly lady suffering from a worsening disease, but also a bitter, both-old, mother-daughter relationship, and a commentary on the abortion rights and what it means to me a mother.
Certain dialogues (the way dialogues are written in this novel is really frustrating, for it switches speakers midway) between Rita and Elena, or between Elena or Isabel (the pregnant woman Rita saves from abortioning, and thereby, probably Rita’s murderer); and certain passages where Rita rages about what ‘more’ could be added to an already disabling Parkinson’s disease, or where Isabel explains to Elena how she’s a mother who’s not a mother; and certain simple description of Elena’s suffrage doing very routine tasks – do indeed make this a novel worth reading and hyping about.
In the Afterward, Dr Fiona Mackintosh, points the irony that what makes this story significant isn’t what Elena knows, but what she doesn’t know. And this irony reaches to the very core of this book. The Afterward, in particular, helped me understand this novel, which for the most part, I failed to understand the point of. This eccentric, intense, lonely, pitiful, yet stoically committed story, and the way its structured, aims to show more than what it says. Sometimes, as individual readers, we need Afterwards to reach to core of a story – and I’m glad that I found one here.
Ratings: 4/5
**** July 17, 2022_