SOURCE: Palmer, Julia. “Some Aspects of Narrative Structure in José Asunción Silva's De Sobremesa.” Revista Interamericana de Bibliografia 41, no. 3 (1991): 470-77.

In the following essay, Palmer identifies and describes the organizing patterns of Silva's novel.

It has only been within the last few years that critics have begun to re-examine the previously somewhat maligned modernista novel De sobremesa. Initially, José Asunción Silva's story of a young poet and his anguished search for something to bring meaning to his life was not particularly well received. A close friend of Silva, Baldomiro Sanín Cano, stated, “es inferior a su obra poética y está por debajo de sus trabajos en prosa” (341).

More recently Juan Loveluck has described the work as “esta imperfecta novela reveladora” (30). In the 1970s Héctor H. Orjuela commented on several aspects of the novel's structure. He argued that, while there was a consistent thematic...