‘I tell the man that the only thing he’ll find on this path is forest. That’s all I know.’ So begins Elisa Levi’s haunting tale. The speaker is 19-year-old Little Lea, a young woman who has lived her whole life in a tiny village at the edge of the forest. The man in question has lost his dog and wants to go searching for it. ‘No, no way, I insist. You’ll die if you go into the forest,’ warns Little Lea.
To distract him from his search, she begins to tell the man the story of her life. As she recounts her strange tale, she thinks that this lost and confused man ‘is the only person in the world who might understand me’.
From this strange and intriguing opening, the entire novel unfolds as a monologue as Little Lea tells the man about her life. It soon seems clear that she’s not really telling him anything at all; this is very much an interior dialogue as she works through everything that has happened to her and what is yet to come.
Levi has set the novel in her home country of Spain, but it could be a story from any small, insular community. The sentiment that ‘small towns smell of cow dung, and piles of dead animals, and fear, and resentment, and boredom, and sorrow, and hatreds that pass down from one generation to the next’ make it very much a universal tale. Little Lea says knowingly of her town, ‘what you’re looking for isn’t here,’ and that telling phrase pervades the entire book.
But Little Lea has a very personal sorrow that goes far beyond the coming-of-age frustrations of small town life. There is a deep and almost unimaginable family tragedy here that eclipses everything else. It’s a tribute to Levi’s clear authorial control that this is hinted at throughout, but only finally, and painfully, revealed in the last few pages.
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Levi is a published poet and a visual artist who has a degree in Cinema and Performing Arts from the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, where she majored in playwriting. This impressive debut novel speaks to Levi’s command of dialogue and her strong visual sense. The language is personal and authentic and creates vivid word pictures. It was first published in Spain in 2021 and has now been released by Daunt Books Publishing in an English-language version by the highly regarded translator Christina MacSweeney.
That’s All I Know is an utterly engaging tale of unendurable sadness and quiet desperation and of how we live with the decisions we make. Highly recommended.
That’s All I Know, Elisa Levi
English translation by Christina MacSweeney
Publisher: Daunt Books Publishing
ISBN: 9781914198786
Format: Paperback
Pages: 210
Release Date: May 2025
RRP: £9.99
