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My Tender Matador: A Novel

2004Pedro Lemebel

4.9/5

It is spring of 1986 in Santiago, Chile, and political and social unrest against Pinochet's dictatorship is growing. In one of the city's poorer neighborhoods, an effeminate homosexual and hopeless romantic known as the Queen of the Corner has fallen in love with a handsome young straight man who is using her house to store mysterious boxes and hold clandestine meetings. What the Queen doesn't know, as she falls hopelessly in love, is that Carlos and his friends are plotting an act of revolutionary sabotage: nothing less than the assassination of Pinochet. While the Queen and Carlos negotiate their unspoken complicity and mismatched affections to the beat of the bolero and the threat of repression, we are also treated to an intimate view of Pinochet's world, replete with revolutionary troublemakers, negative world opinion, fascistic reveries, terrifying nightmares, and an endlessly chattering wife who has more respect and affection for her gay stylist than her macho husband. The novel culminates a few days before the anniversary of Pinochet's rise to power, when Carlos and his comrades carry out their dramatic attack. By one of Latin America's most outspoken and innovative novelists, "My Tender Matador is an extraordinary novel that is by turns lyrical, quietly funny, and deeply moving.
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