My Tender Matador: A Novel

Reading literature in translation is akin to being locked inside a prison cell. All your choices are consigned to the whim of the jailers. Which writers are translated to begin with is a process sometimes determined by market economies but just as often the product of which translators have read whose books, and how well they’ve managed to sell them to editors with small budgets and even smaller faith in their reading public. Writers from certain languages get priority over others—languages that are easier to provide one-to-one translations (French, German, Spanish, Italian) are preferable to those with more alien grammatical rules and alphabets (Japanese, Farsi, Tamil). Westernization plays a factor too—Japanese is a difficult language to translate, yes, but the culture is largely comprehensible to English speakers; Swahili is far easier, on a technical level, though Uganda is considered somehow more foreign for U.S. readers. Hence: many Japanese books on American shelves, few Ugandan. We won’t even get into the issue of race. You get snatches of blue sky every now and then: brilliant writers of another country who’ve managed to break through into mainstream success like Elena Ferrante and Haruki Murakami, superstars in their home countries whose every word will almost certainly find their way to an English-language press. Only to have the covers thrown over the windows again when it comes to other worthy authors, either less notable in their homeland or less noted by our publishers. And too often we’re confronted with the curse of the single-work translation, when a Writer of Note gets one and only one book into English. No matter how brilliant, no matter how extensive a catalog they have, for readers of the English language, this is all you will ever see.Which of course brings me round to MY TENDER MATADOR. Read enough about Latin American literature and you will stumble over the name Pedro Lemebel more than once, a Chilean firebrand whose essays are—I hear—equal parts transcendent joy and incisive observation, humorous and brilliant, moving and trenchant. He’s gay, which matters more than it should in Chile, a country that only lost its Catholic anti-divorce laws this century. (Or at least I’m told all this, but how would I know for sure? Not reading Spanish, all my information comes from what few English sources I’ve happened upon. And here the jailers keep us in the dark again: literature in translation almost always prejudices fiction over essays. Even a lion of world literature like Jorge Luis Borges can’t get his collected non-fiction translated into his most beloved of languages, English, so what hope for drag queen columnists printed in Chile’s least-popular newspapers?) So no, none of his essays--what made him famous!--are available to we poor English speakers, but at least we can make do with this, his one and only novel. And it is, thankfully, a really good one.The plot is a bit of a cliché. A young college student convinces a middle-aged drag queen—known as The Queen of the Corner—to store a series of suspicious-looking boxes in the run-down house she’s renting. The Queen is apolitical, even embroiders tablecloths for the dictator Pinochet’s wife, but is so taken by the college student’s good luck and charm that she willingly feigns ignorance, pretending instead the boxes are filled with college textbooks. The student’s friends hold meetings on the roof of her building which the Queen is not allowed to attend, and to keep her company—and maybe also to keep an eye on her—the student, Carlos, stays with her in the living room below and talks with her about his life and hers. In this way, they begin to fall in love. And yes the students are left-wing radicals, and yes they are plotting an act of violence against the dictatorship—SPOILER for those us who don’t know enough about Chile’s history to remember there was an assassination attempt on Pinochet in the mid-80’s organized by college students—and yes, this drags in the Queen of the Corner and yes, her whole world collapses as a result. The only mild surprises in this kind of story comes from whether the love is one-sided or reciprocated, whether the lovers live or die. (Second SPOILER: MY TENDER MATADOR is many things, but it is nothing like a tragedy.)The plot hardly matters. What matters are the characters, The Queen of the Corner and Carlos, and oh, how Lemebel makes them sing. Living in turbulent political times that are nevertheless not yet a dictatorship, it is hard for me to imagine writing with such a light and tender touch a pair of characters who are impoverished and hunted, who should be angry and disgusted and fed up and who I suppose are all those things but who in this world and this book seem like theirs is the only breath worth breathing, like there is no place better and more entertaining to be than by their side.There is a third character in MATADOR, though, and here is where Lemebel steps up into his genius. Every once in a while, we are graced with scenes told from the perspective of Augusto Pinochet himself. Not angry or evil, simply bored and bland. He has bad dreams and he hates his wife’s nagging. He doesn’t like his troops very much and he wishes his uniform fit better. The weather bores him. He wishes he hadn’t built the new Senate building and contemplates turning it into a hotel. He’s as soft and lumpen a character as he was a soft and lumpen and terrible dictator, who disappeared young men and women by the truckload in order to terrify the populace into submission but who was himself such a coward that he couldn’t face down protests filled with aging mothers and tightly-clutched photographs. The contrast between the candles-burning-at-both-ends light of Carlos and the Queen is impossible to miss. This, the only thing in a book about political revolution that reads like a political point: The students didn’t need to assassinate Pinochet. He’d been dead for years already.There is, naturally, a movie adaptation coming soon, hence why Lemebel has finally found his way into English translation. In the United States our prisons are for-profit affairs, and sometimes we get to paint the bars a pretty color in advance of the bill coming due.

Una novela de amor y desamor. Un retrato de una época oscura de la historia de Chile.

This novel is full of surprises. Dare to test yourself and read this novel from a Chilean author: it's destined to be a classic. It's unfortunate that even at 170 pages many people might find it a "difficult read." But please commit yourself to reading for there are great rewards. For one thing, this is not an "odd-couple romance" or a love story so much as it is a tale of relationship: Chileans with each other and with the concept of nation, with the concept of justice and truth. The action of the novel takes place in September 1986, in a time period approaching the thirteenth anniversary of Augusto Pinochet's military coup of September 11, 1973, (backed by the CIA). Other reviewers of this novel have mentioned the plot and characters, and, yet, this novel is so much more than merely plot and action. Please allow me to say something about the two areas in which this book makes a difference to the world: the craft or art as it mingles with realistic content.About the craft: My Tender Matador shows the joy of language, the pleasure of linking words and sentences to show the sheer wonder that is possible when we write or read. This novel is a synthesis of contrasting aesthetics first illustrated by the unusual pairing of the title words "tender" and "matador." There are phrases and single sentences here which are the highest achievements of the writer and translator's art. Lemebel has a kind of studied yet wild reaching for verbal expression. These hypnotic phrases and sentences form the narrative links between the characters and the changes in scene; this sort of composition is breathlessly poetic, and shows a true mastery of the artist's palette. I'm not sure how much of the aesthetics of this work is the art of the translator, Katherine Silver, but I trust she is faithful to her author.But what is unmistakably Lemebel, is his daring method of narration. Again, be patient while I attempt to explain the nearly-unexplainable. It would be easy to use a cliche to describe this novel, that it is a sample of the "Latin rhythm" or the Chilean beat and music, or that it's like this or that other Latin novel, (and I suppose it is when compared to my 19th-century British and French literary background). But what Pedro Lemebel does in this novel, which I haven't (yet) experienced elsewhere, is take the stream-of-consciousness method and the psychological interiority of Virginia Woolf and push the envelope on that method. In other words, where Woolf had line breaks or quotations marks to distinguish between speakers, Lemebel has none. At first, I didn't know who was speaking, the narrator, a.k.a. The Queen of the Corner, or Carlos, or if the characters were thinking and not speaking. This kind of quick-switching, rolling conversation seems to quicken the pace of the novel, but also shows that people, friends, are made up of each other, while also dramatizing their individuality. For this streaming conversation technique alone, the reading and writing world should be grateful for Lemebel's vision and persistence.Having said that--about stream-of-consciouness--Pedro Lemebel scores a fictional coup with the interior monologues of "Augusto" and his wife; it's interesting how dictatorial, privileged, power-mad people "think." I fear for readers, people in general--so to speak--who are not able to read irony, or who do not know an illustration of hypocrisy when they read it.Sure, this novel is politically charged; perhaps, the heels-over-head romantic love that the main character seeks isn't possible during a time when the nation's leadership oppresses so many people. My feeling is that the tender matador of the title would like to poke fun--so to speak--at the dictatorship, but Augusto, and men like him, take themselves so deadly seriously. Even though "Augusto" as in Pinochet is a "character," it's not a political novel in the sense of promoting an idea or ideology: this is a novel which at every turn shows us it is art, it is "made up," and yet shows us something about the lives we lead under any form of oppressive leadership.Stated another way, it seems to me that Lemebel wanted to form a coherent work out of clashing and contrasting materials, various rhythms of life. Again, allow me to explain. There's a light side and a very serious side to this novel; the main character (a transvestite who represents various conflicts in Chilean life) wants a movie-like romantic love, while Carlos has no time for romance, only for planning to overthrow the government and restore a form of democratic socialism, a caring world. Yes, this novel is politically driven; and yet, the action and characters are so tightly integrated, so intimately linked through Chile, and Santiago in particular, that the characters get their tension, their interpersonal dynamics, from the struggle against the characteristically far-right political and social oppression that was Pinochet's.Enough from me. Now--please--you read and write.

Pedro Lemebel was a Chilean performance artist and writer who clearly depicted Chile's reality during the horrors of Pinochet's dictatorship in a crude, humouristic, heartbreaking, and sensitive way from the hoi polloi's perspective. As part of the LGBTQ+ community, his stories involve characters belonging to minority groups who've been the outcasts of society.A film based on this book was rolled in Chile in 2019 and I had the privilege to work as an extra.

This is the story of a south american transvestite engaged in a love affair during political turbulence. Beautifully crafted, poetically written with exotic, lush imagery. Wildly imaginative and extremely thought provoking. Not sure whether to read it as poetry or as prose sometimes - a deeply moving book, to be read more than once.

Se chocando com o pano de fundo opressor do Chile na década de 80, sob a ditadura de Pinochet (que, ao contrário do que acontece na adaptação cinematográfica - disponível no Amazon Prime Video - figura aqui como personagem), temos uma história bastante delicada, contada através de uma escrita sensível e poética. Gostaria de ter lido no original em espanhol, mas essa edição (apenas ok) em inglês foi a única forma de entrar em contato com a obra, pelo menos por enquanto. Super recomendo!

I had purchased this novel for a Women's and Gender Studies course and was pleasantly surprised at how amazing the style of writing is. I recommend this book to anyone! Beautiful poetic structure and amazing characters.

Excelente entrega, produto ótimo.