A Last Supper of Queer Apostles:
Selected Essays
Selected Essays
Author: Pedro Lemebel
Published by: Pushkin Press
Pages: 225
Format: Paperback
My Rating: ★★★
Published by: Pushkin Press
Pages: 225
Format: Paperback
My Rating: ★★★
Extravagantly stylish, searingly critical dispatches from the margins by a queer Latin American icon, in English for the first time.
"I speak from my difference" wrote Pedro Lemebel, the Chilean writer who became an icon of resistance and queer transgression across Latin America. His innovative essays-known as crónicas-combine memoir, reportage, history and fiction to bring visibility and dignity to the lives of sexual minorities, the poor and the powerless.
In a baroque, freewheeling style that fused political urgency with playfulness, resistance with camp, Lemebel shone a light on lives and events that many wanted to suppress: the glitzy literary salon held above a torture chamber, the queer sex and community that bloomed in Santiago's hidden corners and the last days of trans sex workers dying of AIDS, each cast in the starring role of her own private tragedy.
As Chile emerged from Pinochet's brutal dictatorship into a flawed democracy, Lemebel re-wrote the country's history from the margins, and today his subversive voice echoes around the world.
"I speak from my difference" wrote Pedro Lemebel, the Chilean writer who became an icon of resistance and queer transgression across Latin America. His innovative essays-known as crónicas-combine memoir, reportage, history and fiction to bring visibility and dignity to the lives of sexual minorities, the poor and the powerless.
In a baroque, freewheeling style that fused political urgency with playfulness, resistance with camp, Lemebel shone a light on lives and events that many wanted to suppress: the glitzy literary salon held above a torture chamber, the queer sex and community that bloomed in Santiago's hidden corners and the last days of trans sex workers dying of AIDS, each cast in the starring role of her own private tragedy.
As Chile emerged from Pinochet's brutal dictatorship into a flawed democracy, Lemebel re-wrote the country's history from the margins, and today his subversive voice echoes around the world.
My thoughts:
A Last Supper of Queer Apostles is a literary explosion. During a period marked by poverty, ilnness, and dictatorship Lemebel recalls a hectic, chaotic existence, offering a remarkable and radically uncompromising chronicle of queer life in anti-queer times. His critique of the western colonisation of sexual identity was almost as vicious as it was of the Pinochet dictatorship.
Pedro Lemebel was a queer Chilean essayist, chronicler, performer and novelist. He was openly gay and known for his cutting critique of authoritarianism and for his humorous depiction of Chilean popular culture, from a queer perspective. He is still considered one of the most important queer writers of twentieth century Latin America.
Born in Santiago, Chile, he became a renowned voice of Latin American counterculture throughout the Pinochet dictatorship and its aftermath. His writing has brought visibility and dignity to the lives of sexual minorities, the poor and the powerless.
Most of Lemebel’s writing in this book takes the form of crónicas (chronicles) featuring accounts of Santiago’s queer lifeworld that fall somewhere between journalism and fiction, bringing trans women, drag queens, sex workers, and the AIDS crisis to the front. He published these crónicas first as one-offs in local newspapers, and later compiled into books. This volume brings together the best of his work, introducing readers of English to the subversive genius of a literary activist and queer icon. The writing is often courageous, beautiful, vile, provocative, comforting, angry, loving, exquisite, and full of emotion. He writes in flagrantly incomplete sentences, teasing the reader with long, detailed subjects.
In the introduction, readers are shown a direct quote from Lemebel who commented he would “never write in English’” so it is hard to know how he would actually feel about being translated into English at all, but it is of course a joy for English readers to at last be able to access Pedro Lemebel’s work. This collection includes daring writing which arguably deserves to find its readers around the world through widespread publication and varied translations. I think the variety of translations are important to capture the voice of this writer as accurately as possible.
Admittedly this wasn’t necessarily a book I would have picked up had it not been selected as the June selection for a queer reading group I now attend in Bath, so I’m very pleased to have been introduced to Pedro Lemebel’s work for the first time. I found it quite a difficult read at times but ultimately, I see A Last Supper of Queer Apostles as an important read; a testament to the far more varied and beautiful truths about who lives and falls in love in Chile, beyond the fathers that have dominated its literature.
Overall reaction:
A Last Supper of Queer Apostles is a literary explosion. During a period marked by poverty, ilnness, and dictatorship Lemebel recalls a hectic, chaotic existence, offering a remarkable and radically uncompromising chronicle of queer life in anti-queer times. His critique of the western colonisation of sexual identity was almost as vicious as it was of the Pinochet dictatorship.
Pedro Lemebel was a queer Chilean essayist, chronicler, performer and novelist. He was openly gay and known for his cutting critique of authoritarianism and for his humorous depiction of Chilean popular culture, from a queer perspective. He is still considered one of the most important queer writers of twentieth century Latin America.
Born in Santiago, Chile, he became a renowned voice of Latin American counterculture throughout the Pinochet dictatorship and its aftermath. His writing has brought visibility and dignity to the lives of sexual minorities, the poor and the powerless.
Most of Lemebel’s writing in this book takes the form of crónicas (chronicles) featuring accounts of Santiago’s queer lifeworld that fall somewhere between journalism and fiction, bringing trans women, drag queens, sex workers, and the AIDS crisis to the front. He published these crónicas first as one-offs in local newspapers, and later compiled into books. This volume brings together the best of his work, introducing readers of English to the subversive genius of a literary activist and queer icon. The writing is often courageous, beautiful, vile, provocative, comforting, angry, loving, exquisite, and full of emotion. He writes in flagrantly incomplete sentences, teasing the reader with long, detailed subjects.
In the introduction, readers are shown a direct quote from Lemebel who commented he would “never write in English’” so it is hard to know how he would actually feel about being translated into English at all, but it is of course a joy for English readers to at last be able to access Pedro Lemebel’s work. This collection includes daring writing which arguably deserves to find its readers around the world through widespread publication and varied translations. I think the variety of translations are important to capture the voice of this writer as accurately as possible.
Admittedly this wasn’t necessarily a book I would have picked up had it not been selected as the June selection for a queer reading group I now attend in Bath, so I’m very pleased to have been introduced to Pedro Lemebel’s work for the first time. I found it quite a difficult read at times but ultimately, I see A Last Supper of Queer Apostles as an important read; a testament to the far more varied and beautiful truths about who lives and falls in love in Chile, beyond the fathers that have dominated its literature.
Overall reaction:
