This was reviewed in "Bulletin of Spanish Studies", Vol.88, Issue 4, 2011 by Dr Ciaran Cosgrove (Senior Lecturer and Head of Spanish at Trinity College, Dublin), p. 628: "The fourth section is by far and away the most compelling section of the volume, with Amit Thakkar’s essay on a single fragment of Juan Rulfo’s Pedro Páramo being a truly excellent exploration of the ‘parallel spaces’ that the indigenous, mestizo and white populations occupy in that novel. Thakkar employs three conceptual paradigms in his essay: Rulfo’s inframundo; Unamuno’s intrahistoria; and Bonfil Batalla’s México profundo. The way in which Rulfo represents indigenous society as a ‘world-in-itself’, co-existing alongside that of the mestizo majority is fascinatingly explored by Thakkar. The market place is the ‘locus’ of fragment 48 of Pedro Páramo, and Thakkar insightfully explores the representation of the market ‘as a site not of interaction but rather one of disconnection’ (200). The essay contains exquisite moments of analysis, for example, of the way rain is textualized in this fragment. Thakkar convincingly concludes that, on the one hand, ‘rain is represented onomatopoeically through sounds which imply laughter and mockery; on the other hand, it represents the internal, psychological tensions among the mestizo characters’ (207). Thakkar’s conclusion is that ‘indigenous silence, far from being an obstacle to progress, represents a damning, eloquent and cautionary indictment of a schismatic un-integrated society’ (212-13)."