Argueta's 'authorities', like Kundera's, cannot joke or smile lest they be revealed as too absurd. One Day of Life is the story of Lupe, grandmother at 40, a peasant woman from Chalate in El Salvador….

The story is a sad one, delicately told, revealing not only Lupe's fate as she is caught in the cross-fire of civil war but also (and as remote from our understanding) the peasant life of birds and flowers and dust, the colours of a country woven in a blanket, infant mortality, hunger, water, a precious commodity offered as a symbolic, superstitious gift to friends and enemies alike.

The mirthless authorities have their say: boys equipped with fast philosophy and automatics who do well to overlook the fact that they rose from the ranks of the people they now subdue…. Well-fed and backed by 'the most civilized country in the world' (guess who?), they are...