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.
"Stunning... An instant classic." ―Publishers Weekly, starred review
"One of the most promising first novels to be published recently in Spanish." ―La Vanguardia
"Elizondo García is carving his own path at the forefront of a burgeoning scene in Spanish language literature." ―The Guardian
"A hypnotic odyssey through the dark depths of the soul and of Mexico." ―Le Monde
"We experience Last Date in El Zapotal in the body, but it hunkers down in the mind. Pretending not to feel implicated upon reading this first novel is useless, just one more hallucination." ―Gatopardo
"‘I came to El Zapotal to die once and for all.’ These are the words with which Mateo García Elizondo opens his literary debut entitled Last Date in El Zapotal (Anagrama, 2019). A novel that from the outset evokes the beginning of Juan Rulfo’s Pedro Páramo (1955) and which as it develops suggests references to Malcolm Lowry’s Under the Volcano (1947)." ―apolorama.com
"García Elizondo, with an accomplished literary and creative oeuvre at such a young age, offers in this his first novel such an attractive narrative that readers will remember his name and look forward to his future publications." ―El diario vasco
"Writing of a crafted, expressive intensity that recounts the hellish and tormenting passage of a being who moves between life and death in a visionary climax, in this novel of excess that unfolds in a dark fog." ―El ideal gallego
"Last Date in El Zapotal describes this descent into hell with a language that creates images of enormous expressive intensity and deftly resolves this story in Zapotal, where the protagonist will encounter ‘a reflection of the isolation and emptiness inside me’." ―El diario vasco
"Last Date in El Zapotal encompasses the evils of our time: violence, weariness, unease and oblivion." ―El Informador MX
"The whispers of language trap the reader in the webs of rumours that provide an inquiring keenness to a narrator who is ‘dead in life’ (…) The power of this dying enunciation is everything in this fiction. A problematic, phantasmatic, strangely accurate enunciation that gives an account of how the dead speak, what the bardo is, or how life is lived in a dead-end town, a town that ‘The whispers of language trap the reader in the webs of rumours that provide an inquiring keenness to a narrator who is ‘dead in life’ (…) The power of this dying enunciation is everything in this fiction. A problematic, phantasmatic, strangely accurate enunciation that gives an account of how the dead speak, what the bardo is, or how life is lived in a dead-end town, a town that ‘is just a reflection of the isolation and emptiness inside me’." ―El periódico
About the Author
Mateo García Elizondo (Mexico City, 1987) is a screenwriter and author, and grandson of legendary Colombian author Gabriel García Márquez. His work has appeared in magazines such as Nexos, Revista Casa de las Américas , Quimera, Origami, and Cuadernos Hispanoamericanos . He has written scripts for film and graphic narrative, including the screenplay for the feature film Desierto(2015), which won the FIPRESCI prize at the Toronto International Film Festival. His debut novel, Last Date in El Zapotal, won the City of Barcelona Award for fiction written in Spanish. In 2021 he was listed by Granta magazine as one of the world's best writers in Spanish under thirty-five years of age. García Elizondo is also a celebrated actor, appearing in films such as Tótem (2023), which received rave reviews from both The Guardian and New York Times .
Robin Myers is a poet, translator, essayist, and 2023 NEA Translation Fellow. Recent translations include What Comes Back by Javier Peñalosa M. (Copper Canyon Press); The Brush by Eliana Hernández-Pachón (Archipelago Books); A Whale Is a Country (Fonograf Editions) and In Vitro (Coffee House Press), both by Isabel Zapata; Bariloche by Andrés Neuman (Open Letter Books); and many other works of poetry and prose from across Latin America. Her poems have appeared in Best American Poetry ,Yale Review ,The Drift , Poetry London, and elsewhere; her essays, in Los Angeles Review of Books , Words Without Borders , and Latin American Literature Today .
