la promesa [the promise] (silvina ocampo, tr suzanne jill levine & jessica powell)

Ocampo’s novel is more of a collection of fragments towards a novel than a novel in its own right. The Promise consists of a series of anecdotes about a succession of individuals who have featured in the writer’s life. As such, it offers a whimsical insight into a lost Argentine world, full of feckless men and confused women, caught up in awkward social relationships which leave the participants feeling frazzled. The novel is constructed around the conceit of a woman falling overboard into the Atlantic Ocean, with her past flashing before her eyes as she wrestles with the waves. It’s a brief novel which shouldn’t be read in a hurry, as each sequence carries its own particular weight, although the fact that Ocampo is better known as a writer of short stories is reflected in the fragmented nature of the text. The detail that Ocampo was working on such a slight novel for over 25 years speaks of the fact that this is an unfinished text, one that was perhaps never destined or even meant to be completed.