Customer Reviews

My Tender Matador: A Novel

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Although consisting of only 170 pages, MY TENDER MATADOR is a fine, powerful novel. Based on a historical event in 1986 in Chile, the plot is simple and straight forward. A youth group attempts to kill the Dictator Augusto Pinochet. Carlos, a macho, handsome member of the group stores what turns out to be guns and ammunition in the home of the Queen of the Corner, a transvestite who falls hopelessly, shamelessly in love with "her" young sweaty hero. The story of these two oddly coupled people is told against the historical characters of Pinochet and his wife. At one point their paths actually cross when the Pinochets drive by and see from a distance this attractive couple, Carlos and the Queen, on a picnic. The dictator's wife is envious of the Queen's yellow polka-dot wide-brimmed hat. "Gonzalo [The First Lady's hairdresser] says that yellow is all the rage in Europe, it was the color of the spring-summer season. I'm going to tell him to get me one exactly like that." Though a despised aging effeminate homosexual-- the Queen is in his forties with wisps of hair and dentures-- through the brilliant writing of Pedro Lemebel, he becomes the most sympathetic of characters. He who in abject poverty learns to create beautiful embroidery is contrasted with Pinochet's wife, a petty, scheming cellulite laden nonstop talker.

Consisting of contrasting and repeating scenes, this very visual novel could be made into either a fine stage production or movie or both. Carlos and the Queen have two tableau-like scenes, for example, early in the novel and near the end, when they go on a picnic. There is also the highly suspenseful sequence, broken down by time, "1600 hours", "1605 hours", "1800 hours", etc., when the happenings of the Dictator's motorcade is contrasted by the Queen's visit to an adult theatre. Mr. Lemebel is masterful with language. When the Queen has just cleaned out her apartment before fleeing to avoid being captured by the Dictator's henchmen--"Sitting and facing this view, she blew out puffs of smoke and asked herself, How do you look at something you will never see again?" When she sees Vina del Mar for the first time, a resort of "tourists and beautiful people," she remembers what Lemebel calls "the miracle of the first time she saw the working-class sea."

Trite as it sounds, this sometimes highly erotic novel is ultimately about love and how love, regardless of how difficult or unlikely to happen, redeems us. It is also about the triumph of the human spirit and good over evil, the making of something beautiful out of practically nothing (the beautiful tablecloth that the Queen makes) and finally the importance of courage and hope. MY TENDER MATADOR-- I won't give away the meaning of the title by discussing it-- is a moving and wonderful story.

An exquisite, nuanced and erotic tale of love between a Chilean radical an aging drag queen. This short but colorful story details Pinochet's struggle to maintain power. A chronicle of the passionate yet ambivalent manners in which sexuality plays out in the streets of Santiago; the narrative completes a circle that begins in desire and ends in power. A fascinating little book, and a lovely translation of an amazing contemporary chilean writer

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.

I haven't received my order till this day it has been a month and nothing yet. Sad to say but it has been a bad purchase. Also I have email the vendor and havent heard an answer yet, I think that is the least they can do, to write back. Dissapointed.