the houseguest (amparo dávila, tr. matthew gleeson)

Dávila’s collection of short stories tend to feature the incursion of a bizarre, threatening element into the life of the protagonist. In the titular story, this is the houseguest, whose menacing presence ruins the narrator’s life. In other stories it might even be a Dostoyevskian version of the narrator him or her self. The stories possess a crisp economy, a sly window into the neuroses of mid twentieth century Mexico.