Pablo Neruda…called him “our Kafka” and wrote, “My comrade Juan Emar will now get what here we are not stingy with: posthumous respect.” His prediction seems to have been made a few decades early, but, well, better late acclaim than never. Yesterday is a weird and charming little book, less a predictor of the magical realism to come than a sui generis detour.
— Hanson O’haver, The Nation
For the first time in English, a mind-bending, surreal masterpiece by “the forerunner of them all” (Pablo Neruda)
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In the city of San Agustín de Tango, the banal is hard to tell from the bizarre. In a single day, a man is guillotined for preaching the intellectual pleasures of sex; an ostrich in a zoo, reversing roles, devours a lion; and a man, while urinating, goes bungee jumping through time itself—and manages to escape. Or does he? Witness the weird machinery of Yesterday, where the Chilean master Juan Emar deploys irony, digression, and giddy repetitions to ratchet up narrative tension again and again and again, in this thrilling whirlwind of the ecstatically unexpected—all wed to the happiest marriage of any novel, ever.
Born in Chile at the tail end of the nineteenth century, Juan Emar was largely overlooked during his lifetime, and lived in self-imposed exile from the literary circles of his day. A cult of Emarians, however, always persisted, and after several rediscoveries in the Spanish-speaking world, he is finally getting his international due with the English-language debut of Yesterday, deftly translated by Megan McDowell. Emar’s work offers unique and delirious pleasures, and will be an epiphany to anglophone readers.
Pablo Neruda…called him “our Kafka” and wrote, “My comrade Juan Emar will now get what here we are not stingy with: posthumous respect.” His prediction seems to have been made a few decades early, but, well, better late acclaim than never. Yesterday is a weird and charming little book, less a predictor of the magical realism to come than a sui generis detour.
— Hanson O’haver, The Nation
Yesterday is not, strictly speaking, an exercise in stream of consciousness, though Emar wrings his hands as much as Joyce or Woolf over the mind’s inner-workings. Emar crams this particular day-in-the-life with spectacles, multicourse meals, visits to friends and family, and philosophical daydreams. The mind is at its most receptive, its most imaginative, he suggests, when at leisure… Emar reminds us that neither in books nor in life do we ever have direct access to reality, but that this can serve as a liberating restraint, an invitation to create.
— William Repass, Full Stop
Yesterday—in the original, and in Megan McDowell’s witty, formal translation—is one of the sweetest, funniest novels around. It’s a portrait of a happy marriage; a bizarre daylong picaresque; and a story that resists all logical comprehension.
— NPR
Juan Emar (the pen name of Chilean art critic Álvaro Yáñez Bianchi, 1893-1964) makes his English-language debut with a lucid and absurdist story of a single day….An introduction by Alejandro Zambra notes how Emar’s interest in the European avant-garde contrasted with Latin American literature’s prevailing realism, thus accounting for his lack of recognition. (Emar also posthumously published a massive Proustian novel called Umbral, which is still only available in Spanish.) This arresting story is a great place to start, and it will leave readers wanting to see more of the author’s odd obsessions.
— Publishers Weekly
Juan Emar, the Chilean writer who bears a marked resemblance to the monument to the unknown soldier.
— Roberto Bolaño
Juan Emar, ahead of his time, was no doubt writing for readers of the future, and it’s as arrogant as it is exciting to suppose that those readers of the future are us.
