Mateo Garcia Elizondo for Last Date in El Zapotal
Monday 19th August
Topping & Company Booksellers of Edinburgh, 2 Blenheim Place, Edinburgh EH7 5JH
7pm
7.30pm
Join us for another wonderful evening of translated Latin American fiction with Charco Press this August! We have the pleasure of hosting Mateo García Elizondo for his prize-winning debut novel, Last Date in El Zapotal, 'a hypnotic odyssey through the dark depths of the soul and of Mexico'.
Last Date in El Zapotal
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.
About Mateo García Elizondo
Mateo Garcia Elizondo is a screenwriter and author, and grandson of legendary Colombian author Gabriel Garcia Marquez. 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. Garcia Elizondo is also a celebrated actor, appearing in films such as Totem (2023), which received rave reviews from both The Guardian and The New York Times.