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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... surely fallen when she took off her coat . I saved it to give back to her the next day , and to find a kindling of acquaintance on that coincidental occasion . I went to look in the visi- tors ' book at the porter's lodge for the names ...
... Surely the father was asleep by now in the right - hand side , where the light was out . Spurred by an irresistible impulse , I pulled up some flowers from the thicket , calculated the weight necessary for the bouquet to reach its ...
... Surely he wanted to be alone to commemorate the anniversary . I walked a few steps , and as I felt the wet ground , I stopped under the branches of a tree , near a column whose inscription was partly worn away by the years and the rain ...
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After-Dinner Conversation: The Diary of a Decadent José Asunción Silva,Kelly Washbourne Limited preview - 2005 |