The Houseguest (2018)by Amparo Dávila

Mexican author Amparo Davila

 Book Review

The Houseguest (2018)

by Amparo Dávila

  I'm not sure how I came about reading this 2018 New Directions edition of English translations of Mexican author Amparo Dávila's work.  She was writing between the mid 1950's and the 80's, dying in 2000, and I think this two sentence "Work" description from Wikipedia captures her vibe nicely:

  Davila is known for her use of themes of insanity, danger, and death, typically dealing with a female protagonist. Many of her protagonists appear to have mental disorders and lash out, often violently, against others. Many times the women are still unable to escape from their mental issues and live with the actions they have taken. She also plays with ideas of time by using time as a symbol of that which we cannot change.

  In other words, she is a forerunner of the recent wave of mostly woman authored weird lit coming out of Latin America and Mexico in particular. Reading this collection had some of the same energy as reading I, Who Have Never Known Men by Jaqueline Harpman which is basically, "How have I made it this far with no one ever mentioning her or ever hearing about her independently despite being directly interested in her work and the writers she has directly influenced?"

  It further points to the importance of publishing entities like New Directions and The New York Review of Books, where the goal is often "resurfacing" "lost classics" or raising a lost work to canonical status in part by republishing it.  This is by no means an insignificant phenomenon, and I can confidently say that both Jane Austen and William Faulkner were direct beneficiaries of this same process, going back centuries. 

The Far Edges of the Known World (2025) by Owen Rees

 Book Review

The Far Edges of the Known World:

 Life Beyond the Borders of Ancient Civilization (2025)

by Owen Rees

   If there were more books in this category: general reader level history books about ancient history, I would for sure read them, but the fact is that the underlying research doesn't require more than one new book a decade in most subfields.   Reading everything there is available to a non-specialist about events on the fringes of so-called western "civilization" in English, in the United States, is not hard.  Rees summarizes recent research in areas on the margins of the ancient greco-roman world.   He also includes a section on Europe, and some of the most interesting material is written about modern day Ethiopia. Like all books published in American on this area of interest, the lack of foreign language knowledge condemns the author to reinforce the very historical near-sightedness he seeks to correct.  To take the example of ancient Ethiopia, he doesn't appear to have read anything in Ge'ez.

  Anyway, it is interesting to be sure but nothing mind blowing here, like, I kinda knew what was coming.