A Last Supper of Queer Apostles: Selected Essays

Maybe the most radical thing about Pedro Lemebel's essays is that he embraces ugly, tawdry, violent imagery and he does it with ugly, tawdry, violent language, and the result is riveting and gutting and perfect. Lemebel is there to blow shit up, and to force you to see humanity in places you probably never look.

I came to Lemebel when I read that Roberto Bolano revered him and considered him Chile's best writer. I had been planning to read My Tender Matador, a novel which is the only other thing Lemebel wrote that I can see has been translated into English, but when this became available on Kindle and audio I decided to start with the essays. I am glad I did, and I am now really excited to read My Tender Matador.

The essays here have a show more propulsive energy. The writing is a mashup of prose and poetry, filled with tragedy but often laugh-out-loud funny, muscular and sometimes shocking. But nothing here is shocking in a showy way. Some people write with the intention of shocking, Lemebel tells shocking truths using language you would never have identified as perfect for the task, but which in fact is perfect for the task. The essays cover the US-backed assassination of the duly elected Salvador Allende and the US backed installation of the murderous Pinochet. Lemebel tells us about the violent repression, the Disappeared and their mothers and wives who never stopped searching for them/their remains, and he tells us about acts of resistance, subtle and not, direct and not. He also tells us about living among what we would now call transfeminine prostitutes (Lemebel uses the words "travesti' and "loca" which translate roughly to "tranny") in minute detail and tells us about the ravages of AIDS in Santiago's Gay community. There are no punches pulled in any of the stories. People are tortured and killed by the soldiers, thousands and thousands of them, their bodies slashed, eyes removed with kitchen implements. In the stories about the travesti mouths and anuses invaded for love, for commerce, and sometimes to humiliate and harm. There is a lot of consensual sex in the book, a lot of descriptions of assholes, puckered and gaping, full and empty, unused and abused. And Lemebel is in the middle of all of this. It is sort of a gonzo journalism fever dream, imagine if Hunter Thompson cared about anyone but himself and was a poor, revolutionary feminine-presenting Gay man in a country ruled by a despot. For me, the most impactful section was where he focused on AIDS. Rather than reporting on widespread horrors, Lemebel invited us in to meet these people killed by the disease, to meet their friends and lovers, and to see the impact on them, and I at least mourned with them.

I have never read anything like these essays and I want more. I am hooked. I read and listened to these, and they really lend themselves to audio. The narration by Idra Novey is excellent. I did appreciate being able to look at the prose on the page as well, but If I had to choose just one I think I would opt for the audio. show less

A Last Supper of Queer Apostles gathers together a collection of Pedro Lemebel's essays (crónicas). Lemebel (1952-2015) is/was a brilliant writer whose work focused on the marginal communities of Chile: gay men, the poor, sex workers, and transsexuals. His work is angry, inventive, playful, keenly observing. Reading his work is rather like watching someone juggling fire, with the same uneasy potential for beauty or disaster.

Lemebel's essays are packed with material that one needs to sit with—they demand a period of "sinking in" from readers. A last Supper of Queer Apostles is the first collection of his essays translated into English: they demanded a great deal of and were done justice by translator and editor Gwendolyn Harper.

For show more anyone who understands that the boundaries of their world go far beyond the borders of their country and that gender is not the binary many would insist it *must* be, A Last Supper of Queer Apostles offers a feast of ideas.

I received a free electronic review copy of this title from the publisher via NetGalley; the opinions are my own. show less

Stunning. Criminal that this is the first time in English. My monolingualism is a hinderance on my life.

Un recueil de courts textes, particulièrement forts, imagés, souvent drôles et parfois poignants.