A Surreal Delight
Reviews
By Mark Haber
What’s in a day? A single day? The Chilean author, Juan Emar, attempts to answer this question in Yesterday, his first novel in English translation and a surreal delight. A happily married couple travels to the fictional city of San Agustín de Tango, where scenes of the strange and profound seamlessly mix, while time stretches out, speeds up, and digressions are the order of the day. A public execution, a visit to the zoo, a trip to the studio of a painter obsessed with the color green all transpire and, depending on the whims of the author, occur rapidly, slowly, or in real time.
Immediately, the reader knows they’re in the hands of a master storyteller, part delirious magician and part philosophical trickster. Much will be made of the incidents in the book (an ostrich reverses roles and eats a lion, for starters) and for good reason, but how Emar handles time itself is a revelation. Reading Yesterday, one realizes César Aira’s curious little books weren’t created in a vacuum: Emar was an obvious influence on the part-serious, part-whimsical stories for which Aira has become celebrated. The ambitious balance of playfulness and contemplation, of idea and action, race cross each page of this marvelously strange yet highly accessible novel.
The wonderful introduction by Alejandro Zambra helps place Emar in his time and place. Born in Santiago in 1893, Emar was more interested in the European avant-garde than the works of traditional Latin American authors. Born Álvaro Yáñez Bianchi (his pseudonym is a take on the French expression J’en ai marre: “I’m fed up”), Emar spent years in Paris, among the Surrealists, and his sensibility feels more akin to Robert Walser or Franz Kafka—almost an anti-writer (to borrow the Vila-Matas expression), an author who refused to publish anything in the last decades of his life. Emar’s outspoken indifference to literary culture, whether sincere or not, placed him on the outside of the popular and celebrated writers of his day. Emar was also unlike his contemporaries who were more concerned with realism than the fantastic, and Yesterday is, indeed, fantastic. Emar is the quintessential “cult writer,” something I discovered as soon as I told my Latin American and Spanish-speaking friends I was reading him. Their faces lit up with palpable excitement, as if I’d been accepted into a long-standing secret society.
So what does Juan Emar and Yesterday bring to a North American reader in 2022? Quite a lot. Besides simply being a blast, Yesterday is a charming excursion into the absurd, offering flights of fancy blended with deadpan, knowing humor. And the absurdity isn’t simply for absurdity’s sake: Yesterday is full of ideas and philosophical musings on marriage, memory, nightmares, and potbellies (yes, you read that correctly). Megan McDowell’s translation is lucid and clear and Emar’s ebullient tone is evident from the very first chapter. In the tradition of books (and writers) who don’t take themselves too seriously and are thus able to reach new heights, Yesterday has a lot to teach the reader about love, companionship, and a way of being alive in the world. The wisdom of folly, the belief that humor is an act of grace, as well as the entire lineage of literature, from Cervantes to Sterne, to more recent books by Hilary Leichter and Caren Beilen, that exhorts the prudence of seeing life askew, bursts forth on every page.
Throughout the day-long novel, our narrator, along with his loving wife, move from set piece to set piece, each concluding with an exuberant, “Enough already! Let’s go!” Then the reader is swiftly escorted to the next location, be it a painter’s studio or the narrator’s family home. The city through which these characters move is a thinly veiled depiction of Santiago. But Emar uses details sparingly. Consequently, the setting feels timeless, suspended. Readers can just as easily envision Yesterday taking place today, in any city, in any country.
Although a modest 140 pages, Yesterday feels broad and expansive: the product of a voracious mind and sensibility. Giddy with digression, Yesterday is an examination of time itself, as well as how we experience it; incidents are skipped over or obsessively scrutinized, often lingering and ricocheting in the narrator’s mind, in much the same way that we reenact a conversation or an episode from earlier in the day. It’s also a novel that ponders the inner workings of the narrator’s mind much more than any outside action. Obsessions and fears gather and accumulate as the day progresses. The novel’s inherent strangeness, it’s knowing wink toward the reader, feels utterly contemporary. As Zambra suggests in his introduction, it feels like Yesterday was written for the future—not even for us perhaps, but for those who have not yet been born. My feelings about Emar’s book are similar to those I have for an Aira novel. I love it yet have trouble explaining why. That said, I can single out its joy and open-heartedness, as well as the pure exhilaration of its storytelling. There is no pretense of self-seriousness here; it’s as if Emar is imploring all of us, “Yes, these are big ideas, but let’s have fun!”
Toward the end of Yesterday, our narrator lies in bed contemplating time and memory, remarking: “Now I was in bed, only to get up the next day and return to it at night. To eat, greet, comment, dream, yawn, and love, and finally to sleep so I can wake up and recommence, day to day, elbow to elbow, bone to bone with my fellow man, with the air, with the ground, and with the act of living.” A universe exists inside a day. It contains a whole array of incident and epiphany; the possibility of the cruel and the tragic, yes, but also the miraculous. If our lives are a succession of these things we call days, Emar suggests, then let’s explore and relish them with wonder.
Mark Haber is the author of the story collection Deathbed Conversions and the novels, Reinhardt’s Garden, longlisted for the 2020 Pen/Hemingway Award, and Saint Sebastian’s Abyss, forthcoming in May of this year. He is the operations manager at Brazos Bookstore in Houston, Texas. His nonfiction has appeared in the Rumpus, Music & Literature, and Literary Hub. His fiction has appeared in Southwest Review and Air/Light.
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