. A Last Summer of Queer Apostles , Pedro Lemebel, (Pushkin Press, 2024), 272 pages, £12.99 .
. ‘I could write neat and clear, without so many nooks and crannies, so much useless pinwheeling..
. I could write with no tongue, like a newscaster on CNN, no accent and hold the salt. But my tongue is salted.
..’, Pedro Lemebel writes in ‘In Lieu of a Synopsis’, the opening crónica to A Last Supper of Queer Apostles , a recently published selection of essays by Lemebel.
Lemebel: writer, activist, performance artist and icon of the Chilean cultural scene. He is known in the anglophone world for his only novel, My Tender Matador , published in English in 2005. It is only now with the publication of A Last Supper , nearly a decade after Lemebel passed away, that the anglophone reader will encounter Lemebel in the literary genre he was best known for, the crónica .
A genre popular with contemporary Latin American writers, it sits at the intersection of reportage, personal narrative and short story. In doing so, it gives Lemebel space to write of his memories of life, under the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet, in the shadow of the AIDS crisis, and in the galling post-90s period when Chile sought to forget rather than face up to its cruel past with a vibrancy and a variety not possible in long-form fiction. A Last Supper of Queer Apostles is a literary explosion.
Translator Gwendolyn Harper has organised the crónicas broadly into themes depending on which aspects she feels .
