An extraordinary overview of Onetti's works, focusing primarily on his novels. Narrates a few key factors in Onetti's life but manages to convey the true picture of the man. The pen of Vargas Llosa is without equal. ( )

This is another from my list of books that I had been wanting to read for a long time but couldn't find at a reasonable price. I hadn't remembered it when I went to the library, but as I was looking through the section of Uruguayan literature, it caught my eye (probably because it was a shiny, new edition) and I grabbed it. The book begins with an essay about fiction as an escape from the difficulties of primitive man's everyday life, and traces modern society's literary flights of fancy back to early shamans and other storytellers who helped their people find a collective, imaginative escape from everyday life through stories. Fiction's power as a means of escape from everyday life into a world of fantasy holds special interest in the case of Juan Carlos Onetti, who documents one man's creation of a fictional world and his escape into it in La vida breve. The world created by Juan María Brausen, Santa María, serves as the backdrop for many of his books, which continue to pursue themes related to man´s desire to escape from reality and live in an imagined world of their own creation. After his introduction, Vargas Llosa documents Onetti's work chronologically, with chapters devoted to his major books and short stories interspersed with analysis of the author's major themes and influences.

I enjoyed reading a thorough, chronological account of the work of an author that I admire. It was nice to be able to relate my thoughts and feelings about Onetti's work to Vargas Llosa's analysis. I though his interpretations were on-point, and enjoyed reading about how the influences of Roberto Arlt, William Faulkner, Jorge Luis Borges, Eduardo Mallea and Louis-Ferdinand Céline all helped shape and guide Onetti in his (and his characters') journey into the world of fiction. As I've read books like El pozo and La vida breve this past year, after reading some of Onetti's later books in previous years, I've been intrigued and impressed by the initial progression from one book to the next: Eladio in El pozo sits down to write his biography, which chronicles his fantasy yet is firmly entrenched in the real world; then Brausen in La vida breve sits down to create his own fictional world in which to document his fantasy. In future books like El Astillero and Juntacadáveres, the characters exist in the fictional world, viewing their creator, Brausen, as a god-like figure, building statues of him and speaking of Brausen's control over their destinies. I appreciated having a straightforward documentation of the works of Onetti, and am really happy to have had them presented to me in this fashion. Vargas Llosa also highlights Onetti's talent as a short story writer, and drew special attention to a number of his shorter works that he considers to be amongst the best of the 20th century. Throughout, it's obvious that Vargas Llosa was every bit as amazed by Onetti's work as I have been: he goes so far as to say that at the time of its publication (1950), La vida breve was the most important novel ever written in Latin America.

One section that I found especially interesting involved the possible interpretation of Onetti's books, and specifically El astillero, as representative of Uruguayan society and the stagnation and decay of its economy after years of relative prosperity (it used to be seen as "the Switzerland of the Americas" ). Onetti refuted this interpretation of his work, saying that the story was of one man's individual disgrace, and that the story of Larssen's return to Santa María was not supposed to reflect the issues Uruguay, or Latin America, was facing at the time. Vargas Llosa argues that, even if the author did not intend to have his work reflect the social millieu that he found himself in, his writing could not be entirely disconnected from his environment. I really enjoyed his analysis of the connection between Uruguay and Santa María, and agreed with the idea that the crumbling shipyard, which is maintained by the shared illusions of Larssen, Petrus and the other workers, can be compared to crumbling, decaying Uruguay. As in Mario Benedetti's La tregua, I was once again a bit disturbed by how similar comments about the situation in 1960s Uruguay sounded to those I read in the morning newspaper in the United States of 2010. For example, among other characteristics of Onetti's Uruguay in decay, Vargas Llosa cites:

...the state of frustration, resentment, hate, impotence and desperation caused by these conditions, not only among the victims, but also, growingly, among the most lucid and sensible political and intellectual sectors, which makes for a growing propensity to opt for the apocalyptic, messianic, utopian solution--revolutionary radicalism (The Tea Party?!?)--which has been, along with the egoism, greed and lack of culture of the ruling classes, a great obstacle to the establishment in Latin America of modern liberal democracy with liberty, legal society, justice and prosperity.

"Frustration, resentment, hate, impotence, desperation..." That could certainly describe the United States electorate of 2010! And the "propensity to opt for revolutionary radicalism? Us as well. I'm not proposing to use Uruguay's past as a model for the United States' future, but as we start to look at what it might mean to be in a prolonged state of economic decay, I find it interesting to look at Onetti's depiction of a world where few people think that the future will be better than the past from my perspective as a 26-year old United States citizen. I'm glad that Vargas Llosa found these things in Onetti's writing, even if Onetti himself would have protested--and he did protest--against this type of interpretation of his work.

Really, my only issues with this book had to do with the moments when Mario Vargas Llosa himself shines through. For one, he engages in a bit of unnecessary name-dropping, telling stories about famous people that he met in really cool places. He does relate these stories to his study of Onetti but I thought they were completely prescindible. Perhaps he wished to add color to his academic documentation, but I found myself wondering why he needed to mention, for example, the comment that Julio Cortázar and his wife made to him in their Paris apartment about the prose of Eduardo Mallea; it just felt like he wanted to mention that he'd been in Paris with Cortázar, and since he could find a way to tie it in to this book, he did so. One gets the feeling that Vargas Llosa, unlike Onetti, is quite concerned about literary popularity contests, and about the perception that others have of him. It's a bit off-putting, and while I was wishing for information about the personal connection he felt with the books of Onetti (I had in mind Borges' Evaristo Carriego), it seemed like Vargas Llosa was trying to remind me of how cool he is. He also makes a strangely critical comment about the prose and story construction of Roberto Arlt, which didn't seem necessary nor well-justified: why would he need to take the time to say that he doesn't understand other people's fascination with Arlt, even as he's recognizing his fundamental importance in Onetti's work, as well as affirming his importance in the greater canon of Latin American literature?

Oh well. I thought the literary criticism was excellent, and I'd recommend this book to all those who would like to learn more about the life and work of Juan Carlos Onetti. ( )