In “The Little Sister”, Mariana Enriquez portrays the mysterious Silvina Ocampo

Published on December 24, 2024 at 10:36 p.m. / Modified on December 24, 2024 at 10:37 p.m.

3 mins. reading

She wore large, white, sunglasses and red, patched-up espadrilles. She was extremely rich. She loved dogs. She was a homebody, living in a damp apartment, surrounded by servants whom she did not dare to command. He was believed to have clairvoyant talents. She could have become a painter; in Paris she had studied with De Chirico. She preferred to write, everywhere and all the time. Narrative poems, fantastic short stories – stories full of dangerous games, perverted children, specters and ghosts, metamorphosing settings.

Silvina Ocampo is “the little sister”. Having grown up in the shadow of her five elders in a family of the Portuguese aristocratic elite, she was above all the opposite counterpart of the “beautiful, intelligent, determined, intellectual, modern” Victoria Ocampo, a feminist figure inseparable from the literary life of the 20th century. In the family crypt where they are buried together, no inscription mentions the presence of the youngest. This disconcerting anecdote could have been enough to attract the novelist Mariana Enriquez, who writes in the ink of Argentinian gothic realism, in the mysterious aura of Silvina Ocampo. In reality, all of this woman's manias and singular worlds seem to echo the disturbing work of Mariana Enriquez: What we lost in the fire (2017)Our part of the night (2021)The Dangers of Smoking in Bed (2022) are all translated by Anne Plantagenet and published by Editions du sous-sol.

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