The guests

Life would be so short if it were not for those unpleasant moments that make it seem endless.

“I know no other writer who captures so well the magic of everyday rituals, the forbidden or hidden face that our mirrors do not show us.” Italo Calvino

A work of maturity and one of the author’s most acclaimed books, The Guests (1961) brings together, in Ocampo’s characteristic style, forty-four unsettling stories about her favourite themes—childhood, love, madness, the fantastic—among which “The Diary of Porfiria Bernal”—the astonishing metamorphosis of a governess—, “The Revelation”—the visions at the bedside of a dying man—and the story that gives the collection its name.

An open window into the supernatural everyday, which appears to sensitive beings in spectres and apparitions, Silvina Ocampo’s relentless writing, like the characters she creates, owes its power to a rigorous imagination and a deceptive innocence, capable of tenderness and terror, as if she wanted “to show us Heaven only to cast us into Hell.”