Goodbyes and Stories [antikvár]

Introduction Juan Carlos Onetti, the most important Uruguayan writer of this Century, was born in Montevideo in 1909. He has spent much of his life as a writer in Argentina and more recently in Spain, yet his writ-ing is distinctly the product of the cosmopolitan little country of his birth. Onetti grew up during the great social experiment that turned Uruguay for a time into the "Switzerland of South America," with some of the most impressive public institutions on the continent; his writing, however, dates from the period of Uruguay's Stagnation and slow decline. Onetti has always rejected the idea that literature should express politicai commitment. He has said: "The writer does not carry out any task of social importance" and "Literature should never be 'committed.'" Yet in 1974 Onetti was arrested and jailed by the military government; his subsequent experience in exile in Spain and the grim Situation of his compatriots at home is the theme of his story "Presencia" (1978). Onetti's career as a writer began with the composition of several stories in Buenos Aires in 1933. His first major published work was the novella El pozo (The well) in 1939, a disturbing memoir of frus-trated love and avid desire, which already contains, as the Uruguayan critic Angel Rama has pointed out, the essential elements of Onetti's narrative fiction: desire, deceit, disillusionment. In the 1940s Onetti wrote several other novels, notably Tiena de nadie (No-man's-land, 1941), an urban novel set in Buenos Aires important for introducing Larsen, one of the centrai characters of Onetti's fic-tional world, and for experimentation with the identification of characters not by name but by motifs or characteristics ("the man in the middle chair," "the woman with the yellow hair," and so on), to a bedeviling degree of complexity. It is not until 1950 that Onetti's career as a novelist coalesces, however, with the publication of La vida breve, available in English translation as A Brief Life.