Why are novelists so obsessed with the apocalypse?
A man has lost his dog in a forest close to a quiet village somewhere in Spain. It's unseasonably hot for January, summer-level hot. Before the man can set foot in the forest, a young woman, Lea, accosts him: if you go in, you won't return, she says. Your dog will come back if you just stay put – and, by the way, the world ended yesterday.
It's from this apparent end that we begin Elisa Levi's novel, That's All I Know, first published in Spain in 2021 and now in English translation by Christina MacSweeney. Framed as one long monologue, That's All I Know is Lea's explanation to this unwitting stranger of how the past year has led to 'the world's end'.
That story, as it turns out, is a largely conventional affair of small-town life as it has been told since time immemorial. Newcomers from the big city arrive seeking a bucolic idyll to everybody else's suspicion; almost immediately their house is vandalised. Lea falls in love with one of only two eligible men around; he does not love her back, though the other falls at her feet. Through his back-breaking work for the estate of a wealthy family, Lea's father is exploited; one day he suddenly drops dead.
And so on. Eventually we realise that what is meant by ' the end of the world ' is less something real that might put these traumas in perspective, than a variation on a theme. It's about how you perceive time. It's when somebody dies. It's not X, it's Y. Soon enough all this becomes just a little too introspective and ponderous, to the point that even startling premonitions – such as a snowstorm in summer – aren't enough to break the general ennui. That might make for a more accurate depiction of life in a small town, but it doesn't always make for compelling fiction. If not even the impending apocalypse is enough to raise the stakes, regardless of how it's defined, it's hard to imagine what will.
That's All I Know is at its strongest when Lea talks of loving and caring for Nora, her older and severely disabled sister. Here Levi's prose is genuinely affecting: 'Nora is the light of my life, but her life is dimmed by a veil.' Given the emotional intensity Levi invests in these passages, it's little surprise that Nora's role in the narrative is the only one to gain greater importance as things go on.
Yet this depiction of full-time care, while keenly felt, is still not quite enough for That's All I Know to meet its full potential, which seems to be always sitting there without ever being reached. To paraphrase William Faulkner, real life gives us countless examples of how humanity endures under the looming glare of apocalypse. The job of literature should not be merely to reflect that endurance – rather, it should show us how it might prevail.
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