#RivetingReviews: Sonja van der Westhuizen reviews THAT’S ALL I KNOW by Eliza Levi, translated by Christina MacSweeney
Little Lea lives in a quiet rural town in Spain with her mother and her disabled sister, Nora. When a stranger loses his dog, Little Lea cautions him against entering the nearby forest, claiming that anyone who goes in never comes out. She sees him as the only person who might understand her predicament and proceeds to tell him her story: of how her dog got lost one summer Sunday, but also about her town – a place seemingly suspended in time – and the isolated lives of its inhabitants.
Nineteen year-old Lea captivates the reader with her distinctive personality and engaging stories. She doesn’t have a sense of smell, but she knows her mother smells of limes piled up in a basket and her father of mornings in the orchard. But rural life isn’t as idyllic as city people believe. They … smell like cow dung, and piles of dead animals, and fear, and resentment and boredom and sorrow and hatreds … She wants to escape, but is bound to her little town by the commitment to care for her disabled sister.
According to Little Lea, Nora is an empty vessel – the lack of air when she was born turned her into a ceramic vase. Lea assumed the bellowing noises Nora made were due to a vacuum in her head, asserting that because Nora could not feel, she was unaffected by anything. Yet, when Nora begins to act out of character, Lea interprets her unusual behaviour as a signal that Nora, like others in town, senses the predicted end of the world.
Her father’s death, which occurs while he is merely chasing a rabbit, further forces her to confront the grim reality of her situation. To pay for Nora’s wheelchair, he sold his land to the Dolores family, and subsequently worked for them. My father was a horse, but they treated him like a mule.
Among the town’s 200 inhabitants, there were only four young people: Javier, Catalina, Marco, and Lea. Marco, stout and aggressive, tries to win Lea’s affection, but Lea prefers the slender Javier, who shows no interest in her at all. Catalina, however, cried for everything with the eyes of a fish that’s strayed from the school.
Then there is Esteban, the most fearful man in the world and the killer of Little Lea’s dog. Esteban soon suffers a heart attack; though he survives, he becomes so accident prone that the local priest plans masses in preparation for his inevitable demise. In under a month, Esteban breaks his wrists, suffers a stroke, and falls out of a window.
Through the protagonist’s simple first-person narration, Levi conveys the melancholy inertia afflicting a young girl and her community in a compact 168 pages. The reader feels the resignation enveloping Little Lea, confirming that there are no easy answers, simple resolutions or a future for her. She summarises this bleak outlook herself: Perhaps that’s really the end of the world: waiting for something that never comes.
That’s All I Know skilfully balances its off-beat, quirky character studies with a pervasive, unsettling malaise. The result is a concise, memorable novel that pays homage to the act of storytelling.
Reviewed by Sonja van der Westhuizen
THAT’S ALL I KNOW
Written by Elisa Levi
Translated by Christina MacSweeney
Published by Daunt Books (2025)
December 2025 #RivetingReviews titles are available to buy from bookshop.org.
Sonja van der Westhuizen is a book critic, proofreader and graphic designer for publishers and independent authors. She writes reviews and features for the Crime Fiction Lover website as well as several South African newspapers and magazines, and she has served on the Ngaio Marsh Awards judging panel since 2021. She enjoys a wide range of translated fiction, including crime, literary, and occasionally horror. Her websites are: https://sonjavanderwesthuizen.wordpress.com/ and https://westwordsreviews.wordpress.com/.
Read Sonja van der Westhuizen’s #RivetingReview of LYING IN WAIT by Michel Bussi, translated by Sam Taylor
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