Safe Return Doubtful

(Translated from the Uruguayan Spanish by Kit Maude)

On her 30th birthday, a bored Rebbeca Linke reflects on her mundane existence and contemplates whether anything exciting will ever happen in her life. By night she makes her way to her country cottage and withdraws from the world. Beneath the moonlight, in a trance-like state she takes off all her clothes and Linke and metaphorically decapitates herself, in order to return to the world naked and free.
But when she does, she drives the village crazy; the men seek only sex and are misogynistic, the women are jealous of her nudity. Rebecca, now called Eve, haunts the countryside.

This is an Uruguayan feminist novella that was first published 70 years ago, and has only just been translated to English. It doesn’t read like a seventy year old book at all. Suffused by the supernatural, charged by magic realism, with a spiritual undercurrent, this fascinating piece of work could easily be mistaken for contemporary feminist fiction.

First published in 1950, English translation in 2018

My GoodReads score 3 / 5