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. |
From inside the book
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... strange shape made her look somewhat like the portrait of a young princess painted by Van Dyck that is housed in the Museum in The Hague , they sat down to eat . Slowly , as I examined the strange figure of the man , she removed her ...
... strange proposal . " As you like , " I replied , not knowing exactly what to say , and filled with a childish curiosity that was mixed with a certain strange anxiety . " Excuse me , I am going to send word for the lights in my hall ...
... strange impression of fear that the unintelligible pro- duces . To perceive reality well and to act harmoniously is to be practical . To me what is called perceiving reality means not perceiving all of reality , to see only a part of it ...
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After-Dinner Conversation: The Diary of a Decadent José Asunción Silva,Kelly Washbourne Limited preview - 2005 |