The Promise is [Ocampo's] sole novel, begun in the mid-1960s and left definitively unfinished at the author’s death in 1993. It’s an extraordinary book, for which only Borges’s description of her writing will do—clairvoyant. Ocampo’s narrative premise is elegantly unnerving ... A decade or so into its writing, Ocampo called her novel 'phantasmagorical,' and this I suppose is what she meant: these figures manifest and fade again like ghosts, and it’s quite unclear if they have ever existed ... A novel about the writing of a novel, then, in which plot and character are at best ambiguous rumors. Nothing is certain about the doomed woman’s memories except that they keep coming, spooling out like the internal monologue of one of those solitary garrulous derelicts in Beckett ... Ocampo’s particular art is to have turned such obvious themes into a work of delirious precision ... We’re told that Ocampo struggled to finish her only novel because she had begun to suffer from Alzheimer’s; as her character’s past recedes and the empty ocean claims her, the author seems to be describing her own end. But if that’s the case, the lucidity with which she does it renders autofiction moot, because this long goodbye belongs to us all: 'I am looking at a vanishing world, the world that abandons me, that holds me in its arms and that I cannot restrain.'
At the start of The Promise, the basic plot would appear to be that a woman has fallen off a transatlantic liner unnoticed. If she can only keep recounting her memories to herself, perhaps she will keep up her strength and morale until she is rescued ... 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 ... Passages from the opening pages...take on new meaning, no longer simply describing a self-effacing personality but revealing the isolation of the very old, frail, and dependent ... In short, though all the old stamps of Ocampo are there (a ghoulish mariticide, a dinner-party satire that skewers bourgeois self-regard like a scene from late Buñuel), she has arranged these components to suggest something about decomposition: together they form a theory of memory and its opposite ... The result is a bold phantasmagoria, marked by Ocampo’s insight that in extremis, delirium can be the highest form of truth.
... strikingly 20th-century ... written in a high-modernist mode rarely found in contemporary fiction ... [Suzanne Jill Levine, Katie Lateef-Jan, and Jessica Powell] have captured Ocampo's Surrealist style beautifully, creating translations powered by image and mood rather than character or plot.
...the lone novel by the prolific Argentine author Silvina Ocampo...becomes a brief study of memory, examining how those facing imminent death attempt to plug the holes of their past with the many meaningful scenes—minutiae reimagined, acquaintances revisited, and action relived—that constitute a life lived ... 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 ... This tactic raises intriguing questions about what is real and what is imagined in one’s mind ... [There are] moments that elevate The Promise into a higher echelon of letters; simultaneously, death proves evasive and nostalgia serves as a survival tactic. All the while readers get to witness the wondrous tightrope act Ocampo performs, traipsing back and forth between past and present. It’s soon evident that failures and inconsistencies along the way are not cause for concern, but reason to celebrate the potential of our own memories.
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 ... What follows is an intensely focused series of vignettes in which the characters of the narrator’s life once more walk through their dramas ... 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 ... A seminal work by an underread master. Required for all students of the human condition.
...haunting and vital ... The narrator’s potent, dynamic voice yields countless memorable lines and observations ... But the book’s true power is its depiction of the strength of the mind ... Ocampo’s portrait of one woman’s interior life is forceful and full of hope.
