After-Dinner Conversation: The Diary of a DecadentLost in a shipwreck in 1895, rewritten before the author's suicide in 1896, and not published until 1925, José Asunción Silva's After-Dinner Conversation (De sobremesa) is one of Latin America's finest fin de siècle 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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... Mary Magdalene seated , in profile , elbow resting on right knee and chin in hand , her lifeless eye , as if see ... Mary's posture , seated , covering her face with her hand , and with her shoulders raised in a sob , highlighting her ...
... Mary - seemed more ideal to me nor more moving than that of the marvelous creature who left us her soul written in two vol- umes , which lie open now on my work desk and on whose pages falls , through the curtains of Japanese gauze that ...
... Mary of the Cross ; the third grandfather to be educated at Salamanca was captain of the royal armies and in my country served detestable posts appointed by the Inquisition ; and more distant , towering over all the others , the brother ...
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After-Dinner Conversation: The Diary of a Decadent José Asunción Silva,Kelly Washbourne Limited preview - 2005 |