A review by jayisreading
My Tender Matador by Pedro Lemebel

emotional reflective medium-paced

4.0

I won’t lie, I struggled a bit through this one. I think a large part of it was because of how the novel was formatted digitally that I had some trouble following what was happening. It also didn’t help that there were no clear breaks given that I never really knew where would be a good place to pause (and this may not have been an issue in a physical copy).

Putting aside the above issues, though, I found it interesting that Lemebel told two rather contrasting stories in one novel. The first being from the perspective of the Queen of the Corner, who falls in love with a younger man, Carlos, as well as her reminiscences of cruising and finding herself. The second narrative is from Augusto Pinochet, the military dictator of Chile from 1973 to 1990, primarily going on about his day-to-day life (all the while expressing annoyance with his wife). The stories don’t quite intertwine in the way one would expect, but we see how two very different individuals grapple with the forces of politics shaping their personal lives. One is… well… a dictator doing a lot of that shaping; the other very much wishes to not deal with politics but is caught in its web anyway, in part because of her relationship with Carlos. However, we see in the Queen’s narrative that politics is inevitably going to interfere in everyone’s lives, especially for those who are marginalized. Furthermore, Lemebel presents a poignant examination of masculinity and patriarchy through his two protagonists.

Something else that I found interesting was how the Queen’s gender identity was approached. I’m not sure how Lemebel had this presented in the original Spanish, but I thought it was interesting that the Queen very much perceives herself as a woman and uses she/her pronouns, yet others around her saw and treated her as a gay man and used he/him pronouns. One would think the Queen is being misgendered here, except that she seemed relatively unbothered by this. I do think there’s something being said here about the fluidity of gender, but I also would be curious to know if this was also the case in the original text.

Overall, this was a poignant read. I’d like to revisit this novel (this time, reading a physical copy) and see if I can pick up any details I most likely missed (especially considering my limited knowledge of Chilean history). Fair warning to anyone interested in picking this novel up, homophobia—particularly the use of slurs—is rampant in this one.
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