An appointment with Lady de Mateo García Elizondo

Original Language: Español

Year of publication: 2019

Valoración: Highly recommended

I came to Zapotal because they told me that my father lived here, one … ah, no, that was not (a little wink to Matthew; I know that he must be fed up with those comparisons).

I start again.

This book has been compared (in my opinion, unfairly) with several emblematic novels: Pedro Páramo, under the volcanoamong others. It is undeniable that there are direct influences of these authors, or, indirectly, of the imaginary they have built. However, I can assure that Mateo García Elizondo has written a novel that is sustained for its own merits. Namely: An appointment with the Lady addresses the issue of death from an unconventional angle; It narrates with a disturbing lucidity (although it seems contradictory) episodes of drunkenness and delirium; He resorts to certain archetypes of Mexican literature: the ghost people, the evicted narrator, death as a ultimate destination; But he does it with an original voice, full of irony and subtlety. He even manages to insert moments of black humor in the midst of the most dire scenes.

The premise is simple but devastating: a young man arrives at the Zapotal, a people left from the hand of God, with the sole intention of dying. Every vital impulse has been annulled by a firm will to disappear. And it is precisely that desire for annihilation that gives the protagonist a form of transcendence: nothing worries him already, except to get carried to the other world in the soft arms of opium. Death is imminent, but that does not prevent him from playing with her a little.

Narrated in the first person, history moves between hallucination and resignation, between periods of ecstasy and the wildest monkey, between the search for oblivion and the pieces of a tenacious, fragmented and painful past. Matthew’s style is necessary, without falling into sentimentality, but deeply evocative. The Lady: death, heroin (in its two meanings), the desire to disappear; It becomes an omnipresent figure that accompanies the narrator on his final trip.

An appointment with the Lady It makes a story of death and desolation read as a living work, vibrant and loaded with beauty.

I thank Mateo to have taken the time to talk with us about his book: