We are thrilled to announce our Pride Book Club selection! H&H’s assistant editor Shoshana Bockol will be leading a discussion about My Tender Matador by Pedro Lemebel, a relatively short and profound novel published in the early 2000's set in 1986 Chile (primarily Santiago). A queer love story unfolds between its main narrator, simply known as the Queen of the Corner, and a young man named Carlos, who uses her home (where she embroiders linens for wealthy customers) for storage of unknown items and secretive meetings. The novel is set and entrenched in its political context -- that of the Augusto Pinochet dictatorship -- so much so that Pinochet is the other character via which the reader views the world. The novel's prose is otherworldly yet grounding, musical and poetic, blunt yet quiet, beautiful yet grotesque, doomed yet hopeful. Such is the dialectical experience of My Tender Matador, a book about revolutionary love, transsexuality, political collisions, the personal eye of fascism, and what it means to not just survive, but to seek a better world. There are few better examples of literature that depict the beauty and grime of life in the margins in the Global South.
Purchase a copy of the book here.
Please consider reading the following resources along with the book in preparation for our discussion at H&H Books.
Interview with the author.
An article about Lembel published in The New Yorker after his death.