The Reef

Reina Roffé´s The Reef (La rompiente, 1987) is constructed like a spiral woven around two axes: a trip and a truncated novel. In it the author captures the insecurities of a time of terror, that of the Argentine military dictatorship, but she avoids depicting brutal scenes and any reference to specific times and places. This allows her to explore the possibilities of an individual voice free of censorship, a voice that speaks not only of political repression, but also, and especially, about sexual repression and sexist discrimination in a frightened, prejudiced society. The text, then, consists of the hunt for an elusive, fragmented identity. And the hunter is an ambiguous speaker who assembles the story narrated by the protagonist with the bits and pieces of a life story in search of itself. In 1986 The Reef received the International Prize for the Short Novel, awarded by the city of San Francisco, Argentina, to acknowledge the quality of the prose and the experimental audacity of a work that initiated an original, daring style of narrating subjectivity.