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Juan Carlos Onetti (1909-1994) | |
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Uruguayan novelist and short-story writer, a master in fusing fantasy and realism. Onetti was awarded Uruguay's national literature prize in 1963 and Spain's prestigious Cervantes Prize in 1980. In La vida breve (1950) Onetti created the fictional port town of Santa María, which also is the setting of his later works. Onetti wrote with a mixture of comedy and sadness about the loneliness of life, absurd values, the futility of religion, and the breakdown of modern town life. Although the tone was often pessimistic, his stories were rich in imagination. "I don't know, exactly, when I decided irremediably to accept human stupidity, Santa María, Lavanda, and the rest of the world that I would always be unacquainted with. To keep myself from contradicting. I don't know when I learned to savor in silence my total enmity toward males and females. But my meeting up with Quinteros-Osuna, with his powerful mindlessness, with his incredible talent for making money, brought about an inner self-abandonment, forced me to accept with enthusiasm that form of imbecility which he recognized in me, with exaggerated, almost envious paeans of praise. So I said yes to everything and added details, improvements." (from Let the Wind Speak, 1979) Juan Carlos Onetti was born in Montevideo of Uruguayan, Brazilian, and possibly Irish background. He never completed his secondary education and spent his first twenty years in his native Uruguay, working in odd jobs. He then moved to Buenos Aires, Argentina, where he worked as a journalist and began publishing short stories in the early 1930s. From 1946 to 1955 Onetti edited the Vea y Lea, in Buenos Aires. In Montevideo Onetti edited the highly regarded weekly journal Marcha from 1939 to 1942. He was editor for Reuters News Agency, first in Montevideo (1941-43), and then in Buenos Aires (1943-46). From 1955 to 1957 he was a manager of an advertising company in Montevideo. During his years in Marcha Onetti promoted a radical transformation of literature and emphasized devotion to art. He attacked the tendency to focus on the Nature, and gauchos were for him old-fashioned literary types. Onetti saw that writers should develop stories about the cities. He admired William Faulkner-Santa Maria, a combination of Argentine and Uruguayan coastal towns, developed into Onetti's Yoknapatawpha. Another source of inspiration was the French writer Louis-Ferdinand Céline, with his intense use of language. Onetti's first novella, El pozo (1939) has been hailed by many critics as the first truly modern Spanish American novel, and a precursor to the Magic Realism. It used modernist narrative technique, and brought on the scene a character familiar from the works of Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus. The protagonist, Eladio Linacero, resembles Knut Hamsun's hero in Hunger (1890). He leads his aimless life in a city, where he is unable to communicate with others. He is separated from his wife and has only occasional contact with prostitutes. "The few people that I know are unworthy of having the sun touch their faces," he thinks. "Behind us, there is nothing. One gaucho, two gauchos, thirty-three gauchos." In his nightly self-torture, Linscero recalls his rape of a girl and moral degradation. Tierra de nadie (1941) was set in Buenos Aires and consisted of brief scenes and conversations. In the end Aránzuru, the author sits by the river, meditating the aimless life in the city: "Invisible, behind his back, was the city with its dirty air, its high buildings with the coming and going of people, greetings, deaths, hands and faces, games. It was already night and the city buzzed below the lights, with its men, its hats, boys, handkerchiefs, shopwindows, footsteps, footsteps like blood, like hail, footsteps like a current without a destination." The three-volume cycle of novels and stories, often called the 'Santa Maria Sagas', appeared in the 1950s. In La vida breve the narrator is Juan María Brausen, a writer, who invents a fantasy existence for himself as Díaz Grey, the protagonist of a screenplay he is writing. The story continued in Los adioses (1954). Una tumba sin nombre (1959) depicted a man who is sexually obsessed with a prostitute. One of the characters states: "the only thing that matters is that when I finished writing this story I felt at peace." In La cara de la desgracia (1960) a guilt-ridden protagonist accepts responsibility for the death of his brother and a young girl. El astillero (1961), also set in Santa Maria, focused on the life of Larsen (alias The Bodysnatcher) , an ex-owner of a whorehouse, who works in a rusting shipyard. He plans to marry the daughter of its owner, but the shipyard becomes a symbolic landscape of his own ruin: "Erect, exaggeratedly strutting, he avoided pieces of hanging iron with shapes and names which rested imprisoned on a confusion of wires and penetrated into the shade, into the distant cold, into the reticence of the shed. He reviewed the desks, the threads of rain, the nets of dust and spider webs, the reddish-black machines which continued simulating dignity." Larsen appeared first time in Onetti's second novel, Tierra de nadie (1941). Juntacádaveres (1965) took Larsen back to a time when he was a brothel owner. Despite official support, the project is defeated by the women of the town. In 1957 Onetti was appointed director of Municipal Libraries in Montevideo. As a writer he attracted little critical attention outside Uruguay until the mid-1960s. "Latin American literature has few secrets to divulge to the English speaking world; but one of them is the Uruguayan novelist Juan Carlos Onetti," Gerald Martin said in The Guardian. Onetti's international reputation, and the fact that he was considered the most distinguished Uruguayan author, did not prevent his imprisonment in 1974 by the military dictatorship. He had been a member of the jury, that awarded a literary prize to a short story by Nelson Marra, which the authorities considered to be pornographic and offensive. Onetti was briefly incarcerated in a mental institution. After being released Onetti moved to Madrid and in 1975 he became Spanish citizen. He refused to go back to his country even when democracy was restored. In his new home country Onetti worked at a number of odd-jobs including a waiter, salesman, and doorman. Reflecting his growing pessimism, Onetti had Santa María devoured by fire in Dejemos hablas al viento (1979, Let the Wind Speak), his first novel written in Spain. "Onetti's uneven, troubled career has resolved itself into a large body of critically admired prose that, finally, hews to a single driving artistic impulse: the necessary predominance of writing process. Onetti's anguished, detached narrators, creators of public words and private torments, brought Latin American fiction out of its provincial stasis at a time when talent, opportunity, and attention were poised to grant it greatness, and the Latin American novel from the 1940s onward stands as the heir to Onetti's artistic, self-examining vision." (Bart L. Lewis in Contemporary World Writers, ed. by Tracy Chevalier, 1993) Onetti received several awards including National Literature Prize (1962), William Faulkner Foundation Ibero-American Award (1963), Casa de las Américas Prize (1965), Italian-Latin American Institute Prize (1972), Miguel de Cervantes Prize (1980). In 1985, the new president of Uruguay travelled to Spain to present Onetti with the National Literary award. Onetti was married four times, first with his cousin María Amalia Onetti (1930), in 1934 with his cousin María Julia Onetti, in 1945 with Elizabeth María Pekelharin, and in 1980 with Dorothea Muhr; they had lived together for 25 years. Onetti died in Madrid, on May 30, 1994. For further reading: An Introduction to Spanish-American Literature by Jean Franco (1966); The Formal Expression of Meaning in Juan Carlos Onetti's Narrative Art by Y.P. Jones (1969): Entorno a Juan Carlos Onetti, ed. by L. Gómez Mango (1970); Las trampas de Onetti by Fernando Aínsa (1970); Onetti by J. Ruffinelli (1973); Homenaje a Juan Carlos Onetti, ed. by H.F. Giacomán (1974); Three Authors of Alienation: Bombal, Onetti, Carpenties by Ian M. Adams (1975); Juan Carlos Onetti by D. Kader (1977); Onetti: obra y calculado infortunio by Fernando Curiel (1980); Onetti by Hugo J. Verani (1981); Reading Onetti by Mark Millington (1985); Juan Carlos Onetti, ed. by Hugo J. Verani (1987); La Figura en el tapiz: Teoria y practica narrativa en Juan Carlos Onetti by Sonia Mattalia (1990); The Landscapes of Alienation: Ideological Subversion in Kafka, Celine, and Onetti by Jack Murray (1991); Onetti and Others: Comparative Essays on a Major Figure in Latin American Literature, ed. by Gustavo San Roman (1999) Selected works:
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