Lost in a shipwreck in 1895, rewritten before the author's suicide
in 1896, and not published until 1925, José Asunció n Silva's
After-Dinner Conversation (De sobremesa) is one of Latin America's
finest fin de sič cle novels and the first one to be translated
into English. Perhaps the single best work for understanding
turn-of-the-twentieth-century writing in South America,
After-Dinner Conversation is also cited as the continent's first
psychological novel and an outstanding example of modernista
fiction and the Decadent sensibility.
Semi-autobiographical and more important for style than plot,
After-Dinner Conversation is the diary of a Decadent
sensation-collector in exile in Paris who undertakes a quest to
find his beloved Helen, a vision whom his fevered imagination sees
as his salvation. Along the way, he struggles with irreconcilable
urges and temptations that pull him in every direction while he
endures an environment indifferent or hostile to spiritual and
intellectual pursuits, as did the modernista writers themselves.
Kelly Washbourne's excellent translation preserves Silva's lush
prose and experimental style. In the introduction, one of the most
wide-ranging in Silva criticism, Washbourne places the life and
work of Silva in their literary and historical contexts, including
an extended discussion of how After-Dinner Conversation fits within
Spanish American modernismo and the Decadent movement. Washbourne's
perceptive comments and notes also make the novel accessible to
general readers, who will find the work surprisingly fresh more
than a century after its composition.
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