One hundred years ago today, Juan Carlos Onetti was born in Montevideo to a Uruguayan father who worked as a clerk in customs and a Brazilian mother, a Gaúcha (in Portuguese), from Rio Grande do Sul. Unlike so many other writers, whose relationships with their families can be described as difficult at best, Onetti once referred to his parents as “encantadores” (charming) and his childhood as a happy one. And though most commentators would place him next to other writers comprising the Latin American “Boom,” Onetti was a lone wolf. (In the interviewed he gave to Spanish television, below, he said that he had been “dragged” into the Boom.) He never flirted with any form of activism or indulged in “magic realism” (something that thankfully has been abandoned by most contemporary writers in Latin America) or nativism, naturalism, or any of the other -isms that can obfuscate the nature and quality of a writer’s work. Some commentators have referred to him as one of the few existentialists in Latin American writing, but the fact is that he was his own writer.
Onetti dropped out of high school after the first year to work at odd jobs — doorman, stadium cashier, adding machine salesman. In 1930, he married and moved from Montevideo to Buenos Aires. In 1933, he published for the first time, Avenida de Mayo-Diagonal-Avenida de Mayo, a short story, in the Argentine newspaper, La Prensa. A year later, he returned to Montevideo, divorced his first wife and married her sister. The Spanish Civil War forced a large number of Spaniards to emigrate to America. They settled everywhere on the continent, but the largest numbers settled in Cuba, Venezuela, and Argentina. (In the same television interview, below, Onetti credited this influx of Spaniards with the explosive growth of publishers at the time. According to him, he and a lot of other writers would not have published but for this growth. It would be an interesting thesis to explore — the role of Spanish immigrants in America, the development of modern publishing houses, and the origin of the “Boom.” Stated differently, would the “Boom” have happened without the Spanish Civil War?)
In 1939, Onetti was named editor of the magazine, Marcha, where he lived in a back room. And he published his first novella, El pozo (The Pit), a work that is still considered one of his best. Only 500 copies were published and it was not published again until 1965. In the story, he introduced a kind of protagonist who would dominate his works, the modern male as a recumbent and lazy do-nothing [my translation to English follows the original Spanish] –
Me paseaba con medio cuerpo desnudo, aburrido de estar tirado, desde mediodía, soplando el maldito calor que junta el techo y que ahora, siempre, en las tardes, derrama adentro de la pieza. Caminaba con las manos atrás, oyendo golpear las zapatillas en las baldosas, oliéndome alternativamente cada una de las axilas. Movía la cabeza de un lado a otro, aspirando, y esto me hacía crecer, yo lo sentía, una mueca de asco en la cara. La barbilla, sin afeitar, me rozaba los hombros.
* * *
I paced, half-naked, bored of lying down, since noon, breathing this damned heat that sticks to the ceiling and that now, always, in the afternoon, pours into the room. I walked with my hands behind me, listening to my slippers slap the tiles, smelling each axilla. I turned my head from one side to the other, inhaling, and this made worse, I could feel it, a look of disgust on my face. My chin, unshaven, rubbed my shoulders.
It isn’t difficult to see why some commentators tried to label his work “concrete realism.” The quoted paragraph was hardly the stuff for polite society, especially in the 1930s. I’ve always found the application of the term “realismo concreto” to Onetti’s work more telling of the person using it or of the period in which it was used than of the work itself. After all, no one ever tossed anything like that at Joyce’s Ulysses. And it’s hard to think of a bodily function that isn’t narrated by Joyce, sometimes (to use an Americanism) “graphically” so. Perhaps what was deemed obscene in Joyce’s time was considered “realistic” a few years later.
El pozo is the story of a man, a laborer, who is plagued by the memory of a rape he committed years before. That his victim later died only adds to the guilt the man feels. He imagines the girl’s ghost stalking him. The story also introduces Onetti’s view of life as claustrophobic rented rooms filled with heat and stagnant air and hopelessness.
In 1941, he left Marcha and worked for Reuters. He also published his first full-length novel, Tierra de nadie (No Man’s Land) and returned to Buenos Aires. A couple of years later, he published another novel, Para esta noche (For This Night). In 1945, he married for the third time. Four years after that, he published in the Buenos Aires newspaper, La nación, the short story, La casa en la arena. There, he introduced the city of Santa María, which would become the scene of many more novels and stories, a fictional city, like Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha county. And he introduced the recurring character of Dr. Díaz Grey (sounds like “gray days”).
In 1950, Onetti published, La vida breve (A Brief Life). He considered it his best work. (Many think it is his masterpiece.) It was also his breakthrough novel, the work through which he became known outside a narrow circle of intellectuals in the Southern Cone.
Five years later, he moved back to Montevideo and married his fourth and last wife. He also edited the daily, Acción. In 1961, the first translation of his work, the short story, Bienvenido, Bob, appeared in French. Six years later, he won second place in the Rómulo Gallego literary prize given in Caracas. The first place winner that year, which was also the first year the prize was given, was Mario Vargas Llosa for La casa verde, who nonetheless graciously lauded Onetti’s work. (Only this year, Vargas Llosa published a book about Onetti’s work. From the description of the book, “The subject of fiction and life is a constant that, since distant times, has been expressed through literature. Yet in the work of no other modern author does it have the force and inventiveness as it does in the short stories of Juan Carlos Onetti. It is not an exaggeration to say that Onetti s work is almost entirely conceived to show the subtle and rich way in which human beings have built a parallel existence made up of words and images as unreal as they are persuasive to take refuge in when we want to escape the tragedies and limitations that real life imposes upon our freedom and dreams. In this essay, Vargas Llosa examines how Onetti used fiction to create an alternate reality a reality in which the answer to our daily defeats is fleeing to a fantasy world.”)
In 1975, Onetti moved to Madrid. Meanwhile, his work was translated to Italian, as well as gathered and published in several collections.
Here is a 1977 interview of Juan Carlos Onetti (about 44 minutes, in Spanish) –
He received several literary prizes of distinction, but in 1980 he received the biggest prize of all, the Premio Cervantes, the most prestigious prize in Spanish-language literature. He published his last novel, Cuando ya no importe (Past Caring) in 1993, as a kind of literary testament. A year later, he died in Madrid.
One can speculate why so few of Onetti’s works have been translated into English. It would be easiest to chalk it up to the mythical three percent, that belief by many that only three percent of books published in any year are translations. Like so many figures, the “three percent” is likely a myth, a number created out of thin air with no factual support. Still, no one can refute the fact that translations comprise a very small number of fiction books in the US. And of those books, an increasing number are devoted to the more commercial works of a Pérez Reverte or a Ruíz Zafón, whose mysteries sell by the millions in countless other translations.
Another reason why Onetti may not be well known in the US is the fact that he preferred the short story and the novella over the novel. Anyone who has ever tried to publish fiction here will know the truism that short story collections are next to impossible to sell, this in a country that gives so much lip service to the genre.
One can speculate why Onetti remains unknown in the US and why so few of his works have been translated to English. He was never a “boy wonder” or the “it” writer of the moment. He did not burst into the literary scene, as we have come to expect in an age of media hype. It took Onetti’s work decades before it was widely recognized in the hispanophone world for what it is, a singular and unique body of fiction that merits being placed among the very best. Perhaps it may take decades before the same occurs to his works in English. Meanwhile, too many people in the US are still drunk with “magic realism.” Like partygoers suffering from a bad hangover, they linger unsteadily in Macondo, long after everyone else has left it behind.
My colleague and friend, Palimp, wrote a moving personal note on his discovery of Onetti’s work. Another colleague and friend, Bartleby, also wrote two posts on the works of Onetti.
Photo: Juan Carlos Onetti; Sources: The official website of Juan Carlos Onetti. See also Antonio Astorga, “Cuando Onetti sí importa,” ABC (accessed July 1, 2009), Mario Vargas Llosa, “El viaje a la ficción,” Letras Libres (Feb. 2008)(accessed July 1, 2009)(an essay that was perhaps the germ of the book cited above), Javier Rodríguez Marcos, “Cien años de un genio perezoso,” El país (June 21, 2009)(accessed July 1, 2009). Video: Radio Televisión Española and Joaquín Soler, “A fondo,” (1977), Google videos.
