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Last Date in El Zapotal

ebook
1 of 1 copy available
1 of 1 copy available

A junkie looking for one last fix in a town full of ghosts .

This is a ghost story. A junkie has gone to El Zapotal to die – to rent a room in this crumbling backwater, melt into one last fix, and not come back. For someone so ready to no longer be alive, though, he can't stop clinging to the past. His old dog, Kid, who he abandoned. His love, Valerie, who he introduced to drugs. There's no such thing as a good memory.

El Zapotal doesn't want him either. The people aren't welcoming, the streets are empty except for strays, and he's having trouble pacing his supply. As the drugs run out, the line between what's real and what's not blurs to the point of illegibility, and we're left wandering a tenderly described hinterland of despair, hunger, and regret. García Elizondo has given us an homage to Pedro Páramo , a descent for the ages, a long goodbye with no clear line between the living and dead.

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    • Publisher's Weekly

      Starred review from April 22, 2024
      García Elizondo pays homage to Juan Rulfo’s Pedro Paramo in his stunning English-language debut about a heroin addict who arrives in a near-deserted Mexican village to die there. Haunted by memories of friends who’ve died, including a lover who overdosed after he introduced her to heroin, the unnamed narrator is determined to report on “what dying feels like, because no one sticks around to tell the tale.” Stuck in literal and spiritual limbo among the lowlife denizens of El Zapotal, he searches for the mysterious Juan, said to be the Devil; gambles with fellow addicts who seem not entirely human; learns about a buried treasure from a dying man who may be a hallucination or a ghost; and meets a young girl who can sense the dead. Is he still alive, or is he literally a lost soul looking for the door to the other side? Is there a difference? This existential novella packs weighty themes of damnation, deliverance, and nihilism into its slim page count. It has the incantatory power of a prayer, but whether the narrator’s final passage will take him to God or Satan matters little to him (“We can negotiate that part,” he muses, “after the rush”). This has the feel of an instant classic.

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  • English

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