“She Wore a Bikini”

Alfonso Chase has a second story in the collection Costa Rica: A Traveler’s Literary Companion. “She Wore a Bikini” tells the tale of the missing Adelita González, who may or may not have been wearing a bikini when she was last seen on the beach of Costa Rica’s southern Pacific coast. The narrator of the tale begins and ends the story with, “We all know about the Adelita González affair.  It all came out in the papers, and for several weeks everyone was talking about the case.”

In addition to the narrator’s account of the missing woman, Chase experiments with voice as the bus driver, the hotel receptionist, the cleaning woman, a laborer, the “gossips at the food stand,” the gardener, and a close friend tell their own tales and perceptions of Adelita González.

Both “Faust in Hatillo” and “She Wore a Bikini” are translated to the English by Leland H. Chambers, who has translated many works and is the co-editor of To Tell the Tale: 51 Short Stories by Central American Writers (1963 – 1988).

Photo Credit: Andrew Morrell / CC BY-ND 2.0
Source: Ras, Barbara, ed. Costa Rica: A Traveler’s Literary Companion. San Francisco: Whereabouts, 1994.

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