Manlio Argueta's "One Day of Life" is … all too believable…. [Its style] is something I can only call primitive oral realism. Doña Lupe, a peasant grandmother already old at 45, narrates most of it…. Interspersed at random in a somewhat confusing narrative scheme are monologues by others, including Lupe's daughter, María Pía and Lupe's granddaughter, Adolfina. There are also two sections related by "The Authorities" and "They." All these monologues are addressed to "you," who is sometimes the reader and sometimes, in the case of Lupe's sections, her dead son, Justino, and her absent husband, José.

The events this testimonial novel depicts—the oppression, torture and murder of campesinos by the "Special Forces"—have a grim predictability. In the course of this one day, "you" learn that Justino was murdered and decapitated for helping to organize a demonstration; that María Pía has been crippled...