Why hem and haw at the start when Juan Emar gets right to the point in Yesterday? Everyone loves a memorable opening line – your happy and unhappy families, single men in possession of great fortunes, colonels facing the firing squad, stately plump Buck Mulligans, or screamings across the sky – but can you really top the beginning of Yesterday? “Yesterday morning, here in the city of San Agustín de Tango, I saw at long last the spectacle I had so yearned to see: a beheading.” Hook, line, sinker. If that beginning is like a starting gun, Yesterday runs at its own lunatic pace, begins again and again with multiple bangs, it is somehow at once both digressive and flung forward. Juan, the narrator of the book, lopes about San Agustín de Tango with his devoted wife, Isabel, going from the beheading to the zoo to a painter’s studio to his parent’s place to a bar and many other places inbetween, not to mention a lunch break or two, taking in the world’s infinite possibilities in the compressed space of one day – that’s right, yesterday.
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