Juan Carlos Onetti

Novelas de Santa María brings together three of Onetti's most important works that take place in that city: A Brief Life (1950), The Shipyard (1962) and Body Snatcher (1964).

With prologue by Mario Vargas Llosa. 

“Onetti has invented this place [Santa María] in the way Flaubert invented his Normandy: imagined it as an intricately specified reality. Santa María, like Macondo and Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha County, doesn’t exist, but you can find its twin all over Latin America.” Michael Wood, London Review of Books

On his deathbed, the protagonist reviews the diary annotations of his life from the day his wife left him and the country. His sour resignations of the emotional loneliness of existence and the bleak struggle for material survival frames a return to Onetti's universe of Santamaría and sleazy brothels, now compounded by a drug-smuggling scenario. The hero abandons the city life to befriend the local players in the racket behind a dam-construction project. He is drawn into the lives of Dr. Díaz Grey and his wife, a mulatto housekeeper and her stepdaughter, lorry drivers, the 'Turkish' postman, the denizens o the brothel... and Professor Paley, co-ordinator of the North American front organisation, whose local reps (their physiques fashioned on baseball fields and their minds trained by Blible classes) uphold the company motto 'In gold we trust' by scattering coins to pay off their black and mestizo labourers.

Hardly havens of political correctness, the spare vision of these lives is suffused with warmth and irony. There is a sense that Past Caring? is Onetti's last will and testament to the inner world of his imagination, and a fictional farewell to his readers: a meditation on the approaching death that would curtail further forays from a mind trapped in a failing body. 

Magda, a beautiful prostitute in Buenos Aires, lives in Madame Safo's brothel, lavishly kept by a prominent military leader who can't bring himself to leave his immensely wealthy wife to marry her. Without giving in to passion, resigned, Magda continues her work until one day she is found bathed in her own blood, shot in the head. Simultaneously, the plane carrying the military leader suffers a mysterious accident.

The archetypal Onetti hero, Medina is at different time of his life a (phony) doctor, a painter, a police chief. He lives in Lavanda, across the river from Santa María, a town he is not allowed to enter and that he therefore wishes to destroy. In the end the wind speaks by devouring Santa María with its flames. 

The first novel written in exile in Spain, Let the Wind Speak is Onetti coming to terms with his exclusion form the Santa Marias of his childhood, his first sexual conquests, his first cigarettes, his first double whiskys. A lover's bitter lament –it ends in the destruction of the object of adoration.

“A complex analysis of the condition of separation and solitude that is a tour de force.” Kirkus Reviews

Set, like much of his work, in the mythical city of Santa María, the novel recounts a series of events that violently disrupt the lethargic lives of its inhabitants... Real or imagined guilt, the result of a biological crime or a suicide, are events from which Onetti once again explores, with his particular mastery, the abysses of human personality.

The story told in this novel traces the misfortune of a woman, Moncha Insaurralde, dominated by her wedding dress; a bride returning from a trip to Europe to marry a dead man, Marcos Bergner. It is the memory of a memory: that of the young Moncha whose marriage never took place and who wore her wedding dress on moonlit nights. This narrative is part of the Santa María cycle, an invented place by Onetti, where several of his stories unfold.

Set in Santa María, an imaginary provincial town on the banks of the River Plate (reminiscent of Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha County), Body Snatcher, a tragicomic novel of grotesque ideals and lost illusions, recounts two attempts at self-fulfillment, two Promoethean stories by turns. Larsen, a boldly original pimp of wary whores, tries to establish the perfect brothel; passionate Julita, a mad widow, refuses to accept the death of her husband by taking his younger brother as her lover. In their sordid, self-righteous society, which pits stupidity and lust against honor and love, both characters are doomed to failure.

“Like a South American Faulkner [...] this masterful novel ranks with the fictions of Puig, Cortázar and Márquez. His serpentine lyricism tempered by whiplash irony, Onetti is an elegist of the 20th century, its neuroses, sexual repression, mafias, anti-Semitism, office time-clocks and terminal lives.” Publishers Weekly

“Onetti reads a bit like Faulkner, his hero. Both writers invented a place and, in novel after novel, peopled it with the same characters. Both Faulkner and Onetti get the metaphysical chills; they are equally astonished by the mere habit of being alive. Similarly, both writers’ characters are almost caricatures, woodcuts rather than watercolours. [...] The very beauty and startling unpredictability of his prose attest to his devotion to something—possibly art alone.” Harper Magazine

“Body Snatcher offers an edgy comment on the vanity of human wishes, memorably mingles sarcasm and pathos... This book is frankly phantasmagoric, a detailed report on an extraordinary folly, but it is written with the bemused intimacy we all have with our own moments of craziness. It is, to evoke Conrad again, like Heart of Darkness in slow motion, and irreparably cut off from anything resembling mundane or practical reality. A man steps into a fantasy which others play along with, and which nothing, strictly, contradicts or confirms... The triumph of the book is the agility and ingenuity and wry sympathy with which Onetti evokes this astonishing and desperate game, this story of a ‘fat, obsessed man’ in ‘a ruined, unlikely office’.” Michael Wood, London Review of Books

The Shipyard chronicles an anti-hero named Larsen who returns to a fictional place, Santa María, to try to revive a useless and abandoned shipyard. With all the enthusiasm of a man condemned to be hanged, Larsen takes up his new post. Like the other workers at the shipyard, he routinely goes through the motions. Every so often, his sense of reality is shaken by a tremor of self-deception and then it is possible to believe that the yard's glory is not just a thing of the past. In spite of its melancholy and sense of alienation, Onetti's novel conveys, through its unique poetic language, a real sense of transcendence and hope. Allegorical, reflecting the decay and breakdown of Uruguayan society and modern urban life, The Shipyard is a landmark of Latin American literature.

“In The Shipyard, Onetti achieves an almost perfect balance, an artistic economy that seems almost miraculous.” Mario Benedetti

“In The Shipyard he found the absurd and compelling metaphor he had been looking for all his life, so that he was able to become something like a Conrad who had soaked himself in Beckett, or a Dashiell Hammett who had been reading Camus and Ionesco... Onetti denies having had any conscious allegorical intention in this work, any idea of picturing or prophesying the fate of Uruguay or Latin America, and I think we should take him at his word. But The Shipyard brilliantly catches a quite particular mentality, not confined to Latin America, but not peculiar to Larsen either. It involves what Larsen calls the acceptance of a farce as if it were a job, and there are many farces, public and private, that we go on playing out because we can’t bear the thought of what’s beyond them. If Larsen in The Shipyard is not an allegory, he does set in motion something like a fable, or parable. He is like a character in Kafka, only far shabbier: his life is not ours, but we can’t disavow him entirely, we have been in parallel places.” Michael Wood, London Review of Books

In A Grave With No Name Onetti returns to the imaginary world of Santa María, the mythical city which forms the backdrop to many of his novels. A woman dies. A doctor watches the bizarre funeral procession straggling through the poor farmsteads with a goat bringing up the rear –'lame, slavering down its beard, one leg in a splint...' He gradually pieces together the story –or stories– behind this woman, who might be Rita, who had stood outside the railway station begging –or soliciting– in the company of her goat. In his attempt to uncover her true history,  to distinguish fact from fiction, the narrator is irresistibly drawn into a world of tumbledown shacks and shattered dreams. 

“I am particularly fond of Farewells. I wrote it very quickly, with lots of love, even for the words. Some of my other works may be more literary. But I have a special feeling for it, I like it more.” Juan Carlos Onetti

In Farewells, a young international basketball player is dying of tuberculosis. His arrival at a sanatorium in a mountain holiday resort prompts speculative and, at times, vicious gossip among the guests. The narrator, café-owner cum shopkeeper, recalls the physical beauty of the dying sportsman with admiration and affection. The male nurse and hotel maid, the tubercular residents and the café clientele wonder over this enigmatic loner. Letters arrive... Two women visit –his wife and his mistress? He moves into a chalet... Making love in his condition? Is this a scandalous threesome? Incest? Or 'that oddity, the well-knit family'? Who can tell? Subtle detail, snatches of conversation and the café-owner's recollections create a mysterious network of unlikely relationships in 1950's Argentina.

“For many it is Onetti's masterpiece –he also often said that it was his favourite of his works– (...) I have read Los adioses many times, since I was twenty years old, and I am convinced that it is one of the two or three best short novels ever written in Spanish.” Antonio Muñoz Molina

“Farewells is perhaps the best introduction to Onetti, the place where we meet his odd curiosity and his distinctive tone, both clinical and kindly, in their most undisguised form.” Michael Wood, London Review of Books

In A Brief Life, Juan Carlos Onetti's protagonist, Brausen, is caring for his wife after a long illness. To compensate for the physical void which temporarily stalls their caresses, Brausen eavesdrops on his neighbors, a husband and wife, imagining their gestures and their expressions. He also imagines stories: of a mythical town called Santa María, and of a doctor named Díaz Grey. But he not only wishes to imagine himself as someone else, he also seeks release from the world he knows. He leads many lives, some real and some fantastic, in order to experience a moment of psychic weightlessness—a 'brief life'.

“Onetti was too late for some fashions and too early for others. He was an existentialist before he had read Sartre, but everybody else had read Sartre before they read Onetti. He invented and peopled a Latin American town like García Márquez’s Macondo, but he filled it with obliquities and ironies rather than miracles. Onetti owes a lot to Borges, as almost all contemporary Latin American writers do, but a hard-boiled manner borrowed from North American detective fiction conceals many of the more dizzying conceptual moves he makes. Onetti’s work is always on a knife-edge: it could lapse at any moment into sententiousness or bathos, and quite often does. But the edge itself makes it like no other writing we are likely to meet.” Michael Wood, London Review of Books

Tonight is set in a port which has surrendered to the forces of an anonymous general. It could be Valencia in 1939, Buenos Aires or any city after a dictator has come to power. Inspired by conversations with anarchists exiled in Buenos Aires after their defeat in the Spanish Civil War, Onetti structures his novel as a thriller to map out the despair of the men trying to avoid capture and the sadism of those in pursuit. Morasan's secret police patrol the seedy quayside bars, hunting down Barcala and Ossorio. In an atmosphere of suspicion, fear and betrayal, these erstwhile revolutionary leaders question their political inspiration, cling to memoires of moments of warmth and passion as the net draws ever tighter around them: 'All there is is this trap and us waiting to be cut to pieces.' 

Onetti's stark and ironic prose brilliantly conveys the pointlessness of war, the terror of betrayal and the futility of death in the name of lost heroic causes.

In No Man’s Land, Juan Carlos Onetti dissects a restless, rootless generation of intellectuals, would-be artists and political activists in the city of Buenos Aires. Their parents came from Europe to find a land of plenty in Argentina and now they are caught in a void: neither Argentinian nor European. Theirs are spiked conversations in shadowy bars and brothels, ringing with disillusion. Political idealism has been shattered by the signing of the Nazi-Soviet pact. Men and women find no solace in flesh or in feeling as they pursue ghosts form their amorous pasts. Abortion, suicide and failure weigh heavier than fantasies of tropical islands or the dream of a new world. The chaos of lives on the edge of the abyss is caught in a jagged, cinematic narrative, swiftly moving through sequences of abrupt scenes.

In Onetti's cycle of novels, No Man's Land is a key work, in which the focus shifts from the solitary protagonist of The Pit, to the first appearance of Onetti's greatest creations: Larsen the corpse-gathered and the vividly realized imaginary town of Santa Maria. If The Pit anticipated Sartre's existentialism, then No Man's Land is an early incursion into the fragmented space of an end-of-history post-modernism. 

"The Graham Green of Uruguay... foreshadowing the work of Beckett and Camus." Sunday Telegraph

"Onetti's voice and subject matter are his own... his work is always on a knife-edge... He is laconic, elegant, literary." London Review Books

"The Onetti experience is a curious one: readers end up feeling that they understand life better after a stay in this ghostly, tantalizing wold... The form is subtle and delicate, the message sordid an bleak, the flavour inimitable." The Guardian

Eladio Linacero, 'a lonely man having a smoke in some old corner of the city', dwells upon fragments from his past on his fortieth birthday. From afar he sees the rising tides o Stalinism and Fascism in Europe, but is uninspired by the left-wing activities of his room-mate  and the mythical endeavours of thirty-three heroic gauchos fighting for Uruguayan national independence. His relationships with women –dominated by memories of his rape of a girl in his youth– are a futile quest for lost innocence. Married love perished when an interest in crockery and refrigetors took over. A chance encounter with the poet Cordés kindles a spark of friendship which soon dies when he responds coldly to Eladio's writing.'Why don't things happen tot he man who waits and reaches out with all his heart from some forsaken street corner?

"The birth of the Latin American novels dates from the appearance of The Pit, the first novel by the Uruguayan novelist Juan Carlos Onetti" Mario Vargas Llosa,  Times Literary Suplement

"Dear Sad: I understand, despite the inexpressible and innumerable ties that binds us together, that the moment has come for us to thank one another for the intimacy of the last few months and say goodbye. You have all the advantages; I accept my guilt, responsibility, and failure. I try to excuse myself –only for the benefit of the two of us, of course– by invoking the difficulties involved in vacillating for so many pages. I also accept the happy moments as well deserved. In any case, forgive me. I never saw your face directly, never showed you mine." Juan Carlos Onetti

Narra la visita de un ex-campeón del boxeo a Santa María. El cuento está reconocido como una referencia inevitable en la narrativa breve latinoamericana. Incluido en los volúmenes Cuentos completos y en Novelas Breves. Álvaro Brechner dirigió la película Mal día para pescar (2009), basada en el cuento de Onetti. 

La cara de la desgracia sirve para explicar la forma en que Onetti construye una historia con el residuo de otra. La situación narrativa de La cara de la desgracia se estructura a partir de la lógica de la memoria, atada a la imposibilidad de reconstruir el pasado, y es ella la que determina la construcción de un mundo donde la ambigüedad privilegia los diversos niveles del relato. Desde esta perspectiva, este análisis se concentra en los recursos estilísticos y estructurales ligados a la evocación del recuerdo, la confesión, la ruptura del tiempo y la configuración simbólica de los espacios.

El personaje de esta historia es un joven que intenta sobrevivir en un entorno que casi siempre le resulta ajeno y asfixiante. En ese contexto, la búsqueda del amor representa lo realmente perdurable en contraste con lo efímero. La primera reflexión del personaje anticipa un temperamento independiente y divorciado de convencionalismos, cuando observa a un profesor ya anciano, quebrado y desgastado por el tiempo y una rutina exasperante. El protagonista percibe a ese hombre desahuciado y quizás hasta en los umbrales de la muerte, como el símbolo de una sociedad que rechaza por su resignación e inmovilismo. En el siguiente cuadro vivencial –tan o más representativo que el anterior– el protagonista se integra a una animada tertulia que reúne a un grupo de presuntos intelectuales, donde el tema dominante es el arte. En este cuadro, Juan Carlos Onetti propone al lector asomarse a un universo de intensos debates dialécticos gobernados por la vacuidad, donde forma y contenido entran en permanente conflicto. Más allá de la controversia, aflora el rostro de una sociedad por entonces ajena a la cruda realidad cotidiana, que se agota en la teoría y en la intelectualización de discursos abstractos.

Reissued numerous times, the texts gathered here constitute the most comprehensive collection of his thought, showcasing his original way of addressing history, current affairs, and literature, always in service of the most generous principles and ethical values that form the valuable foundation of his work as a writer. Indispensable for its substance, this collection brings together texts spanning over forty-five years of critical work, from 1950 to 1994, representing the core of the author's life. Edited by Jorge Onetti.

Correspondence with Julio E. Payró.

This volume documents the epistolary exchange between the two figures from 1937 to 1955. It is a joint project of three publishers, released in the year marking the centenary of the author's birth. It includes 67 letters between two distinctly different personalities, Juan Carlos Onetti and Julio E. Payró.

A Dream Come True, beautifully translated by Katherine Silver, gathers Onetti’s entire body of short fiction into English for the first time.

Onetti’s characters drift untethered, through strange places with unfamiliar people. A woman idles in a beachside hotel during a prolonged convalescence; a grandmother serves café-con-leche to schoolboys resembling her lost grandson. In these mysterious, dream-like stories, everything is gestured at, nothing plainly told. Each offers a brief glimpse into the life of one of Onetti’s vast cast of unusual characters, intimately rendering their sorrows, fears, and joys.

“Onetti’s stories are enigmatic and elegant. [...] A writer well deserving of his place in the Latin American canon.” Kirkus Reviews 

Juan Carlos Onetti's work addresses the misfortunes of human life from a perspective that combines existential questioning with the staging of fiction and its power to save mankind. Eterna Cadencia Editora has compiled his novellas (El pozo, Los adioses, Para una tumba sin nombre, La cara de la desgracia, Jacob y el otro, Tan triste como ella y La muerte y la niña), into a single volume, also including a foreword by Juan José Saer. 

En tres volúmenes:

• Novelas I (1939-1954)
• Novelas II (1959-1993)
• Cuentos, artículos y miscelánea

Este libro recoge sus cuentos completos en una nueva edición revisada por Hortensia Campanella. Una nueva oportunidad de recorrer los mundos más sugestivos, de acercarnos a la fantasía y a los personajes de uno de nuestros clásicos más inquietantes y sugerentes.