Book excerpt: THE DAYS OF OFELIA, which was first published in 1942, is a book about Mexico that cuts through the surface and shows you the living people. ‘Vivid,’ ‘delightful,’ ‘completely real’ are worn-out phrases, but there are no others that do justice to this truly extraordinary narrative. Ofelia Escoto was a little girl that the author, Gertrude Diamant, met when she went apartment-hunting in the City of Mexico, and who became her maid. Ofelia’s father was a nightwatchman with a family of thirteen to support; and for many months the author shared the life of the Escotos, sympathized with them in their misfortunes, and watched the love story of Ofelia’s brother Daniel, with its tragic denouement. But the book is more than the story of the Escotos. It tells also of visits to the parched, poverty-stricken country of the Otomi Indians, where the author went to conduct ‘lost intelligence tests,’ of the picturesque dances and rituals of a wedding in tropical Tehuantepec, of the hazards of traveling in a Mexican bus along the Laredo highway, of the wisdom displayed by Mexican judges in handling the homeless children of the Revolution, and of the vagaries of Mexican officials who tried to deport the author on the ground that she was a Polish refugee. “It is amazingly well written; it has humor, it has charm, and it conveys the flavour of Mexican life with extraordinary accuracy. To me, it seems much the best book on life in Mexico which has appeared since Flandrau’s classic ‘Viva Mexico,’ both in the quality of the writing and in the accuracy with which it catches the Mexican scene. It is far superior to the innumerable books on Mexico that have appeared during the past decade.”—H. B. Parkes, author of History of Mexico