Remembered

After work I finished reading Forgotten Journey by Silvina Ocampo. It was very very good. It was first published in 1937 and didn't get published in an English translation until 2019! Especially given her associations (with her husband Casares as well as Borges), it speaks pretty heavily to the sexism in the literary publishing industry that it took that long! A cursory glance into it gives me an idea that she was a dismissed somewhat in Argentina, I guess because of the Borges association in that she was trying to be Borgesian and not succeeding. Now, there are some surface similarities but in general what they're doing is not at all the same. I mean, they both blend the ordinary and mundane with the fantastical and surreal, but I'd say they both approach it from opposite directions. Borges places the fantastical into ordinary and pedestrian settings and categorizations, while Ocampo describes the ordinary and mundane in surprising and surreal ways. They both also rely on a streamlined and economical style (though the styles themselves are not the same at all). Of course, it still speaks to the sexism that, being associated with a famous male writer, they could only conceive of her trying to follow his lead instead of forging her own unique approach to literature. Anyway! Go read her! (The two books I've now read, this and The Promise are both extremely short so neither should take you long at all! Also, many thanks again to Mary Beth for getting me several of her books for Christmas a couple years ago!) At night we did our Superlo grocery shopping. I woke up today with my neck feeling a little worse again. There's still some snow on the ground outside, in places.