Book Review

Although I may not reach my annual reading goal for the first time since 2016, there was one book I read twice this year. That’s All I Know, the novel by Elisa Levi and translated by Christina MacSweeney, accompanied me like a companion at the end of the world. After all, for Little Lea, the world ends every day, and she knows a thing or two about its miseries.

In a rural Spanish town, Little Lea sits at the edge of a forest where she warns a man who has lost his dog not to follow it into the trees, lest he want to disappear. His dog will come back, she assures him, and in the meantime, he can sit and listen to her for a spell. What follows is a novel of Little Lea “ruminating,” as she describes it, musing on everything that burdens her in the town where she’s been stuck all nineteen years of her life. “Has your life ever gotten tangled?” she asks the man, never waiting for his rare replies. “Well, mine has.”

The man has so happened to find Little Lea on the first day of a new year, one day after the world was supposed to end according to some predictions, and a day when she has finally decided it’s time to leave the town; not leave, actually, but escape, as Little Lea believes this the only way out. Her town is only four streets, has a forest that swallows people up, and the few people who live there have always lived there. Almost nothing happens to them, but their grievances accumulate. She recalls telling her mom, “‘We’re so remote here even the end of the world would forget to include us.’”

When a family moves into town, Little Lea is so distrustful of their intentions that she and her friends may or may not begin harassing them with unwelcoming messages and cruel pranks. As she tells the man at one point, if she ran the town, she would put signs all around with a warning: “What you’re looking for isn’t here.” There can’t be anything worth coming for, and that long-held belief provokes Little Lea into believing that it’s past time for her to go, too.

Little Lea’s vocal repetitions provide a refrain between her thoughts, often ending an extended ramble with the book’s title: “But that’s all I know.” And what Little Lea knows is a lot. For one, she knows a lot about suffering, both big and small. “I don’t know how it is where you’re from, sir,” she explains, “but here, just as hatred lasts, other feelings also become so huge they’re immeasurable and, sir, despite the boredom, the passage of time here makes us magnify whatever so much as brushes our skin.”

What brushes Little Lea’s skin becomes magnified, magnificent meditations on grief, love, and loneliness. In her characteristic style of ruminating, she continually stumbles upon wisdom:  “Death, sir, death is just a few days of tears. But I can’t deny that it’s essentially an end of the world, a brief explosion that upsets everything and gives rise to a tremendous desire to flee from where you are.” The death of her father, among other events, has left her gut burning with the knowledge that she must escape the town before it swallows up her whole life like the forest.

Alongside this loss, her sister was born with a debilitating illness that leaves her mostly paralyzed, unable to communicate beyond finding ways to hurt herself, which Little Lea takes to mean she wants to die. On top of that, her mom—Big Lea—has stopped talking to her, their mutual resentment festering. In Little Lea’s eyes, the world ends all the time. The world ended when her father died, the world ended when her sister was born, and the world goes on ending in uncountable ways: “The world, sir, has killed itself so often that it makes no difference now.”

Though stream-of-conscious, Levi’s control of Little Lea’s voice is such that every moment of the narrator’s ruminations is at turns touching, funny, and profound. At only 154 pages, the novel is slim, but a young woman’s entire life to that point is contained within. I never wanted it to end, thus a second read in the same calendar year was required. 2025 has been a year of the world “killing itself,” in Little Lea’s words, with cruelty seeming to proliferate in every headline. Hard to hope, still harder to keep going.

“Life goes on, sir,” Little Lea tells her attentive friend, “and the emptiness fills up.” But in the meantime, Little Lea fills the emptiness with her ruminations, with words that weigh the toll of grief and how one decides to keep moving, if at all. With That’s All I Know, Levi makes a case to continue living, even if the world ends and goes on ending in its infinite, merciless ways.