Yesterday
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- $9.99
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
For the first time in English, a mind-bending, surreal masterpiece by “the forerunner of them all” (Pablo Neruda)
In the city of San Agustín de Tango, the banal is hard to tell from the bizarre. In a single day, a man is guillotined for preaching the intellectual pleasures of sex; an ostrich in a zoo, reversing roles, devours a lion; and a man, while urinating, goes bungee jumping through time itself—and manages to escape. Or does he? Witness the weird machinery of Yesterday, where the Chilean master Juan Emar deploys irony, digression, and giddy repetitions to ratchet up narrative tension again and again and again, in this thrilling whirlwind of the ecstatically unexpected—all wed to the happiest marriage of any novel, ever.
Born in Chile at the tail end of the nineteenth century, Juan Emar was largely overlooked during his lifetime, and lived in self-imposed exile from the literary circles of his day. A cult of Emarians, however, always persisted, and after several rediscoveries in the Spanish-speaking world, he is finally getting his international due with the English-language debut of Yesterday, deftly translated by Megan McDowell. Emar’s work offers unique and delirious pleasures, and will be an epiphany to anglophone readers.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Emar (the pen name of Chilean art critic Álvaro Yáñez Bianchi, 1893-1964) makes his English-language debut with a lucid and absurdist story of a single day. It begins with a man's public execution, apparently for the crime of telling people about the carnal pleasures he shared with his wife. The beheading is witnessed by the seemingly dispassionate first-person narrator and his own wife. Emar's elegant prose, precisely translated by McDowell, places intense focus on the minutiae of the day, such as the details of the couple's meal and sightseeing in San Agustin de Tango, Chile. In a museum, the narrator observes a painter's use of innumerable shades of green ("The green of silence, the green of murmurings, the green of pandemonium"). Ultimately, the narrator's thoughts of death, which he's kept to himself ever since the drop of the guillotine, lead to a shocking and illuminating request of his wife. An introduction by Alejandro Zambra notes how Emar's interest in the European avant-garde contrasted with Latin American literature's prevailing realism, thus accounting for his lack of recognition. (Emar also posthumously published a massive Proustian novel called Umbral, which is still only available in Spanish.) This arresting story is a great place to start, and it will leave readers wanting to see more of the author's odd obsessions.
