The promise

This haunting and vital final work from Ocampo (1903--1993), her only novel, is about a woman's life flashing before her eyes when she's stranded in the ocean. The nameless narrator has fallen off a ship, and as she floats, her mind takes over, presenting a flotilla of real and imagined memories about the people in her life in the form of a version of the book she promises herself she'll finish . The book's main thread is a woman, Irene, and a man, Leandro, with whom both Irene and the narrator get involved. But the fluid narrative also encompasses brief snapshots of a murder mystery, the narrator's grandmother's eye doctor ("In profile, his intent rabbit face was not as kind as it was head-on."), her hairdresser, her ballerina neighbor, and the fruit vendor to whom her brother was attracted as a boy ("it was a fruit relationship, perhaps symbolizing sex"). The narrator's potent, dynamic voice yields countless memorable lines and observations: "The only advantage of being a child is that time is doubly wide, like upholstery fabric"; "What is falling in love, anyway? Letting go of disgust, of fear, letting go of everything." But the book's true power is its depiction of the strength of the mind ("what I imagine becomes real, more real than reality") and the necessity of storytelling, which for the narrator is literally staving off death: "I told stories to death so that it would spare my life." Ocampo's portrait of one woman's interior life is forceful and full of hope. (Sept.)

A woman relives the people and places of her life while stranded in the middle of the ocean.The premise of Argentinian writer Ocampo's posthumously published novella, which she worked on for the final 25 years of her life, is a grand metaphor for the authorial condition. On her way to visit family in Cape Town, the nameless narrator somehow slips over the railing of her trans-Atlantic ship and regains consciousness in the water, watching "the shipcalmly moving away." Adrift, facing almost certain death, she makes a pact with St. Rita, the "arbiter of the impossible," that she will write a "dictionary of memories," and publish it in one year's time, if she is saved. What follows is an intensely focused series of vignettes in which the characters of the narrator's life once more walk through their dramas. There's Leandro, a handsome and feckless young doctor with "a face as variable as the weather"; Irene, his intensely focused lover and a medical student in her own right; Gabriela, Irene's obsessive daughter; and Vernica, a not-so-innocent ingnue. These central characters' stories entwine and begin to form the basis of a tale that includes our narratorwho is present as a voyeur but never an active participantbut her drifting consciousness is just as likely to alight upon less crucial secondary characters like Worm, Gabriela's countryside companion, or Lily and Lillian, devoted friends who fall in love with the same man because "instead of kissing him they were kissing each other." As the narrator's memories progress, and sometimes repeat, they grow increasingly nightmarish in their domestic surrealism. Meanwhile, as all chance of rescue fades, her sense of self is diluted by the immense mystery of the sea. Completed in the late 1980s, at a time when Ocampo was grappling with the effects of Alzheimer's, the book can be read as a treatise on the dissolution of selfhood in the face of the disease. However, its tactile insistence on the recurrence of memory, its strangeness, and its febrile reality are themes that mark the entirety of Ocampo's oeuvre and articulate something more enduring even than death. "I'm going to die soon! If I die before I finish what I'm writing no one will remember me, not even the person I loved most in the world," the narrator exclaims in the final pages. This urgency and despair seem to sum up the central tenet of the artist's conditioneven in the final extreme, the act of making is a tonic against obscurity. Art is the cure for death.A seminal work by an underread master. Required for all students of the human condition. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

I'm such an ignoramus. How could I publish this text! What publisher would accept it? I think it would be impossible, unless a miracle occurs. I believe in miracles. "I love you and I promise to be good," I used to tell her, to gain her sympathy when I was a child and for a long time afterwards whenever I'd ask her for a favor, until I learned she was famous for being an "arbiter of the impossible." There are people who don't understand that you speak to a saint as you would to anybody. If they'd known all my prayers they would have said they were sacrilegious and that I am not a devout believer in Saint Rita. The statues or statuettes usually depict this saint holding a mysterious wooden book in her hand, which she presses against her heart. I never forgot the detail of this pose when I made her the promise that, if I were saved, I would write this book and finish it by the time my next birthday came around. That date is almost a year away. I've begun to feel anxious. I thought it would be a big sacrifice to keep my promise. To make this dictionary of memories that are at times shameful, even humiliating, would mean giving over my intimacy to anyone. (Perhaps this anxiety was unfounded.) I don't have a life of my own; I only have feelings. My experiences were of no importance, neither throughout my life, nor even on the threshold of death, but rather the lives of others become mine. Copying these pages on the typewriter would be a thankless task, as I don't have the money to pay a typist to make the copies (neither do I have altruistic friends who know how to type). Presenting the manuscript to editors, to any publisher in the world who might refuse to publish the book, so that I would have to pay for it inevitably with the sale of objects I value or with some menial work, the only work of which I'd be capable, would mean sacrificing my sense of pride. How distant are those happy days when I would eat the chocolates in the Keystone Cop wrappers or the chewy white candies with my little nephews in Palermo, swinging on the swings, or sliding down the slide. Those times when I felt unhappy, now seem to me so joyful, when my nephews would get their hands so filthy playing in the dirt, that when we'd go back home to my sister's house, instead of taking a bath or going to the movies, I would have to clean their nails with Carpincho saddle soap as if they had been in the Police Department Headquarters after leaving fateful fingerprints. I, who always considered it useless to write a book, find myself committed to doing this today in order to keep a sacred promise to myself. Three months ago, I boarded the Anacreonte bound for Cape Town, to visit the less tedious side of my family: a consul and his wife, cousins who always looked out for me. Everything we want too much turns out badly, or never happens at all. I got sick and had to return as soon as I arrived, because of an accident I had during the trip over there. I fell into the ocean. I slipped on the deck where they store the lifeboats when I leaned over the handrail to catch a brooch that hung from my scarf and had fallen off. How? I don't know. Nobody saw me fall. Maybe I fainted. I came to in the water dazed by the blow. I couldn't even remember my name. The ship was calmly moving away. I shouted. Nobody heard me. The ship seemed more immense than the sea. Fortunately, I'm a good swimmer, though my form is quite deficient. After the first shock of cold and fear had passed, I glided slowly through the water. The heat, the noonday light helped me along. I almost forgot my fearful predicament because I love sports and I tried all the styles of strokes. At the same time I thought of the dangers the water could inflict upon me: sharks, sea serpents, jellyfish, waterspouts. The ebb and flow of the waves had a calming effect on me. I swam or floated on my back eight straight hours, waiting for the ship to return to pick me up. I sometimes wonder how I managed to nurture that hope, and honestly I don't know. At first I felt so much fear I couldn't think, then thoughts came to my mind haphazardly: I thought of schoolteachers, noodles, movies, prices, theater productions, the names of writers, titles of books, buildings, gardens, a cat, an unhappy love affair, a chair, a flower whose name I couldn't remember, a perfume, a toothpaste, etc. Memory: how you made me suffer! I suspected that I was about to die or that I had already died in the confusion of my memories. Then I noticed, upon feeling a sharp burning in my eyes caused by the salt water, that I was alive and far from dying since those who are drowning, it is known, are happy and I was not. After getting undressed, or being undressed by the sea in that way the sea undresses people as if with a lover's hands, there came a moment when sleep or the craving to sleep took hold of me. In order not to sleep, I imposed an order on my thoughts, a kind of mental journey or itinerary I now recommend to prisoners or patients who cannot move, or to the desperate who are on the verge of suicide. Excerpted from The Promise by Silvina Ocampo All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.