That's All I Know
A Novel
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
Nineteen-year-old Little Lea lives in a rural town where life ends at the edge of the forest.
When a stranger loses his dog on the first day after the end of the world, Little Lea warns him not to follow it into the forest, that people who enter never come out. Over a shared joint, she tells him about the burning in her gut, winding a tale of loss, desire, and conspiracies.
Little Lea sees the world through backcountry eyes that distrust the outsiders who come but who also get to leave. When she isn’t working at her mother’s grocery store, she cares for her empty-headed younger sister, Nora, who only cries when she’s in pain. Meanwhile, her friend Catalina does nothing but cry. Little Lea wants Javier to love her, and she doesn’t want Marco, who leaves weed and his best potatoes on her doorstep. As the town prepares for their end-of-the-world festival, she faces her intensifying desire to leave, that burning that unsettles her life—she wants to be useful somewhere else, even if it means being unloved, unwanted, unable to return. That’s all she knows.
In a formally ambitious sustained monologue meant to distract the man as the forest does its work, Elisa Levi’s That’s All I Know explores the toll of caring for those who cannot care for themselves, the fear of the unknown that anchors people to unfulfilling lives, and the bravery it takes to stop deceiving oneself, to give in to longing.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
A young woman longs for a new life outside of her rural Spanish town in the arresting English-language debut from Levi. Lea, 19, has spent the past year preparing for the apocalypse that her town's mayor had claimed would arrive by now. It's New Year's Day, 2013, and when she meets a man passing through town whose dog has just wandered into the nearby forest, she warns him against entering, claiming that "people who go into the forest never come out." She proceeds to tell him the story of her life, detailing how she's helped her mother care for her younger sister, Nora, who can't speak or move, and recounting their fruit-picker father's accidental death on the job. When a family arrives from the city in early 2012, Lea gets the itch to leave for bigger things, and near the end of the year, Nora begins acting strangely, trying to bite her tongue off and refusing to eat, prompting Lea to take drastic action. The cruel depictions of "empty-headed" Nora can be tough to stomach, but for the most part Levi's frank and acerbic prose works to the book's advantage, highlighting the story's absurd nature and brutal action. This eerie tale is worth a look.
