Safe Return Doubtful

translated from the Spanish (Venezuela) by Elizabeth Bryer – Published by HarperVia in 2024

Angustias Romero describes her journey as she leaves the eastern mountains of an unnamed Latin American country with her husband and newborn twins to reach the town of Mezquite. In the first few pages we learn two things; that a plague that attacks the memory is rampant throughout the country, the reason the family left their home, and that the twin boys die during their migration.

Angustias carries the boys’ bodies in shoe-boxes determined that they will receive a proper burial. Once in Mezquite, she learns of Visitación Salazar, a woman who buries people for free in an illegal cemetery people call ‘The Third Country’. The boys are laid to rest, and the husband disappears, leaving the grieving Angustias to decide to stay, and assist Visitación in her grim task.
Meanwhile the town of Mesquite is run by a brutal cartel by way of unmeasured violence and corruption, a place of death and desperation.

Sainz Borgo, herself Venezuelan, alternates between third-person narration and Angustias’ narrative, but in both cases the mood is acerbic and threatening, with blunt and concise sentences which highlight the barbarity of the environment. Subplots abound, and it may be that the effect of the novel would have been greater without some of them, but this is an extremely powerful observation of grief and hopelessness; pensive, desolate and bleak.

My GoodReads score 4 / 5