The promise

Silvina Ocampo, Suzanne Jill Levine

"A dying woman's attempt to recount the story of her life reveals the fragility of memory and the illusion of identity"--. A woman traveling on a transatlantic ship falls overboard; adrift, she makes a promise to Saint Rita, "arbiter of the impossible," that if she survives, she will write her life story. As she drifts, the story of her life-- a repertoire of miracles, threats, and people parade tumultuously through her mind. Eventually her imagination begins to commandeer her memories, escaping the strictures of realism. Ocampo worked to perfect this novella over the course of twenty-five years, nearly up until the time of her death in 1993. The narrator's conflicted memory, as well as the intrusion of memories that are not her own, mirror the author's struggle with dementia in the last years of her life. In this, her final work, we meet Silvina Ocampo at her most feminist, idiosyncratic and subversive