The Promise by Silvina Ocampo, translated by Suzanne Jill Levine and Jessica Powell
First published in 2011. First published in English by City Lights Books.
In December, we’ll be reading Silvina Ocampo’s posthumous novel, The Promise (La promesa).
Ocampo started writing La promesa in 1963 and, as she suggests in the book, worked on it off and on for the next 25 years. It’s one of several books that was discovered among her papers and published years after her death in 1993 (although its existence was known about long before that).
From reviews and commentaries:
• Pierce Alquist, Book Riot
Silvina Ocampo worked on perfecting this novel over the course of 25 years, right up until her death in 1993, and it’s out this fall in its first ever English translation. It’s being published alongside Forgotten Journey, a collection of short stories by Ocampo translated by Suzanne Jill Levine and Katie Lateef-Jan. In The Promise, a woman reminisces about her life, and lets her imagination get away with her, after falling overboard into the sea–a reflection of Ocampo’s own struggles with dementia and her interest in memory and identity. It’s said to be Ocampo ‘at her most feminist, idiosyncratic and subversive’.”
• Claire Mullen, LA Review of Books
The novel is told from the point of view of a woman who has fallen off of a ship and is floating in the ocean. As she floats, she recalls the people she has met in her life, examining each as a bead on the string of an opalescent necklace.
“I don’t have a life of my own; I have only feelings,” the narrator begins. “My experiences were never important — not during the course of my life, nor even on the threshold of death. Instead, the lives of others have become mine.”
This statement could be applied just as much to Ocampo’s life as to her narrator’s. As the academic critic Cynthia Duncan wrote, Ocampo “lived most of her professional life in the shadow of others,” and represented the traditional and conventional image of the obedient woman. Similar to Virginia Woolf’s Clarissa Dalloway, Ocampo uses her narrator to subtly critique the society that has kept her subservient, and softly tears it apart from within.
• Alina Stefanescu
In 1975, Ocampo told an interviewer she felt this was the best book she’d ever written— this “phantasmagorical novel”— and she had trouble finishing it given the narrator’s promise and the constraint she built for the text. Because the narrator’s voice continuously “tells” and “recounts,” Ocampo said it was also difficult to find a way to soothe the expectation of narrative linearity that many readers would bring to the page.
“Under the guise of a posthumous autobiography”—this is how the book’s foreword suggests Ocampo had decided on this a decade before her death. And maybe she needed to feel death near in order to write it—maybe what’s at stake in this sort of story requires the proximity of personal mortality.
It is Ocampo’s longest fictional work, arranged as a series of linked stores, that dictionary of linked memories narrated by a voice in between worlds. Maybe the woman is in the water—we don’t know this, and we don’t know her name—she defines her life through the ability to inhabit others, which is to say, to write others and save them. What the foreword calls “the theater of her memory” is simply the writer’s mind, the tangle of characters and fascinations, and I couldn’t stop thinking about this, about the lyric of these translated lines.
• John Gibbs, Zyzzyva
Perhaps what’s most interesting and impressive about Ocampo’s investigation of the mind is just how collective the retelling becomes. Our protagonist does not so much retell the scenes of her life as recount scenes of the lives of others in relation to her, acting more as a voyeur than a direct participant. Even when a potent sensual memory is conjured it is not the narrator’s memory that’s evoked but the imagined memory of another character,:
He caught a whiff of her hair that emanated a dirty brush smell in the heat, like the heads of those people in his childhood kneeling in confessionals, smelling of cheap perfume and powders, of barbershop pomade.
This tactic raises intriguing questions about what is real and what is imagined in one’s mind. Ocampo, whose sister Victoria founded the legendary literary journal Sur and whose husband was Adolfo Bioy Casares, suggests it is not merely the fact of what happened, but rather the reality of a feeling that may or may not have occurred that stamps itself indelibly upon us.
Entire passages, pages even, repeat themselves throughout the book. As Ernesto Montequín states in the introduction, this repetition is by design, and serves to offer additional perspectives or small variants to the narrative, reshaping the narrator’s identity. In short, this tactic demystifies the idea that memory is stable, suggesting its very nature is nebulous.
• Laura Kolbe, New York Review of Books
We meet a woman named Irene and her near-feral child Gabriela (at times, a pronoun- and vowel-changing Gabriel). Irene is doggedly pursuing a medical degree despite being destitute, in order to woo a caddish fellow student, Leandro (magnetic to everyone, including our narrator). Leandro loves Verónica, whom he met by impulsively attending her sister’s funeral in order to engage in some light necrophilia.
As The Promise goes on, however, even stranger intrusions and non sequiturs begin to make the reader suspect that the narrator—with her guilelessness that at first suggested an ingenue—is actually much older than one supposed, and that the place she is lost may not be the sea. Her initial account of her own life becomes usurped by its supporting cast, who crowd out the planned account of herself. Their lives grow more vivid than the narrator’s own, enacting the casual vampirism of youth upon age, as younger people grow in vigor at the expense of the blanched, dissolving presence of the soon-to-die.
We will be talking about The Promise on:
US: Monday, 6 January 2025
8-9PM Eastern
7-8PM Central
6-7PM Mountain
5-6PM Pacific
Australia: Tuesday, 7 January
12 Noon-1PM Australian Eastern
11:30AM-12:30PM Australian Central
Sign up for the Wafer-Thin Books mailing list for the Zoom invitation.
