Safe Return Doubtful

translated from the Spanish (Colombia) by Frank Wynne

This isn’t as good as The Storm, but González’s prose is still captivating, especially when he writes about the sea, which is the case in both novels.

It is about a young and ambitious couple (J. and Elena) who seek out the sea to get away from the city life they have grown to despise. They leave for an exotic getaway to an apparent paradise on Colombia’s Atlantic coast. But instead of building a new life together they are torn apart by their inability to settle in a working community much poorer than their previous bohemian existence. In addition, the sun shines ferociously, it rains at the wrong time, the insects bite, and their supposed idyll becomes an ordeal.

This Frank Wynne translation was published in 2015, thirty years after the novel was first published. It may resonate today in its theme of the clash of class, luxury lifestyles propped up working lives of people in extreme poverty, by but it was based around Colombian society in the 1970s.
González’s own brother Juan, like the fictional J, abandoned the intellectual elite of the city to meet a tragic end in the remote idyll of the countryside.

The real strength though is in the writer’s sharp and succinct delivery, particularly when he writes about the natural landscape, the bush as well as the sea. I’ve said it before, but in this regard, he puts me in mind of the Welsh writer, Cynan Jones.

My GoodReads score 4 / 5