by Michael Harper
May 20, 2025
That's All I Know by Elisa Levi; Graywolf Press; 168 pages; $17.00.
Little Red Riding Hood disobeys her mother and takes a shortcut through the woods. Hansel and Gretel are abandoned in the forest by their step-mother, but Lea, the storyteller of That's All I Know by Elisa Levi, only stares at the forest that looms on the outskirts of her small Spanish town “at the end of the world.” Like the rest of the village, she parrots the truth they all know: those who go into the woods never return.
Lea is 19 years old and lives with her family in a four-street town. The outside world feels forever away, though in the summer they can smell the salt in the air from the ocean where larger towns exist. A rumor about the impending end of the world begins spreading amongst the townspeople, infusing every incident in the village with meaning and marking every event as an omen. The community prepares by twisting these omens to their own worldview, folding the ambiguous threat into the morals they’ve built their culture around.
The Folklore genre provides a way for Levi to explore a cultural history without setting the novel in the distant past. The isolation and tradition create a sensation of timelessness and stagnation that emphasize the presence of the past in the everyday, and many Folklore and Fairytale elements hover in the surreal spaces of the novel. The dead father of Lea’s love interest, for example, shows up one day as a goat, and “the most scared man in the world” miraculously survives repeated instances of certain death. There is also a deadly weed that his son fights by shooting it with his rifle, and most notably, there is the forest looming over the town.
The most significant connection to folklore, however, is Levi’s choice to have the novel written almost completely as a monologue by Lea, who comforts a man who has lost his dog and convinces him not to go looking for it in the forest, preaching patience that it will return. The oral storytelling creates a rhythm that casts a spell over the entire work and generates an atmosphere in which disbelief and bewitchment thrive. Lea’s voice creates an aliveness to the text; her words twist and bend, justifying town beliefs while simultaneously complaining about her neighbors. This flexibility creates a narrative that exists somewhere between trustworthiness and belief, between truth and myth. In this space, what is real loses importance and instead the reader is whisked away in the voice and the story.
The author’s form reinforces the major reason people tell stories in this novel as a way of soothing fears and explaining a chaotic and unexplainable world, but it is also in confrontation with the morals of the town. It is messy and complicated and unique to Lea’s experience, which clashes harshly with the one-sentence summative morals that everyone around town spews to explain tensions and unease, most notably “Better the devil you know.” This habit of categorizing trickles down into the small truths Lea and her friends say, not as morals but as facts in their lives that simplify and explain existence, like announcing “here comes the most handsome man in town” every time Javier walks toward her or denounces outsiders as dangerous. These small, efficient perspectives contain truth, but are also uncomplicated, putting blinders on their experiences. As Lea talks and talks and talks these complexities begin to reveal themselves and untie the moral knots of the town that her body is literally rejecting as her gut burns throughout the novel.
Levi’s coming of age story embraces the conflicting lessons of fairytales, especially for female protagonists. While the Little Mermaid is punished for leaving home, her soul is turned into a luminous spirit. Little Red Riding Hood might be eaten along with her grandmother by the wolf, but Cinderella is rewarded for seizing the moment and disobeying her family. Just as the lessons in these stories are inconsistent, so are the doctrines of the town in Levi’s novel. There is an easy answer for everything, but the morals in those answers don’t necessarily align, and as Lea speaks, it becomes clear that their main function is to keep things as they are.
Lea’s teenage perspective is key to unlocking these inconsistencies. As her mother states, “I can’t leave. Life has become too complicated.” While Lea’s life experiences are limited, and she is unappreciative of some of the benefits of her town, her critical eye allows her to look at the suffering all around her first, instead of the justifications. While the adults are stuck in their different modes of survival, she has enough life in front of her that living through so much unending suffering and boredom is a worse fate than the dangers she is constantly warned against.
The forest is a constant reminder of this. Throughout her story, Lea and the stranger are staring at its foliage. It is the ultimate fear because it is the ultimate unknown, and although the reader never learns much about the forest, we’re told that anyone who enters it dies and the people who tend to disappear are the ones whose identities have been shattered but stuck in the small town. In this respect, Levi’s work is akin to Amos Tutuola’s folklore, in particular “The Palm Wine Drinkard.” In the preface for his book, Tutuola refers to leaving the road and entering the bush; this is a place of danger and ghosts, but it is also a place of magic where adventure and knowledge can be found. “If you enter it you cannot know the way out again, and you cannot travel to the end of it for ever.” The threat of the forest, constantly looming, constantly trapping, and constantly threatening Lea since she was born, slowly transforms from a place of darkness and fear into an opportunity for escape.
Fairytales teach us what to fear, but what Levi's novel seems to be asking, is what if our need for safety has limited our ability to grow? What Lea starts to wonder as the novel comes to a close, is if the people in the forest don’t die, do they simply leave behind the village? Levi resists the tidiness of an answer and leans into Lea’s teenage antagonism. Lea has inherited the beliefs of the town and can’t clearly categorize it as bad. She understands her culture has evolved to a place where its stories won’t allow it to evolve at all, and it will kill her to stay. Lea feels something for the place, not love, “but the prolonged affection of living in a small town.”
But the end of the world is looming, and throughout the novel there are subtle references to the rising temperatures and unseasonably warm months that aren’t connected to the end of the world. These do, however, hint at a larger literal and metaphysical threat that the stories of the town aren’t capable of facing. It is a threat that will not only bring death, which is something the village has dealt with, but it will also force a change in identity. Ultimately, Levi's That's All I Know offers a new type of fairytale, a mixture of old and new, for a new world with new problems.
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Reimagining Fairytales and Folklore in Elisa Levi’s That's All I Know
FICTION REVIEW
Image by Johannes Plenio from Pexels
Michael Harper teaches at Northern New Mexico College. He received his MFA from the University of Idaho. His most recent work has appeared or is forthcoming in Ninth Letter, X-R-A-Y, Hobart, Fugue, Terrain.org, The Los Angeles Review, and others.
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